Master's degrees bridging mathematics and computers (UIUC) and theology and philosophy (Cambridge)
Anthropology / Cultures
Computer Science / Programming
Linguistics / Languages
Mathematics
Philosophy
Theology
User Experience
Writing
Possessions on person:
Black robes.
Swiss Army Knife toolchest.
Portable computer that is designed for outdoor use in inclement weather and can run any operating system he wants and any programming language he wants.
A non-5G iPhone which he would not trade for a new one.
He has had a lot of being in the right place at the right time, and started his first and now most extensive website at cjshayward.com, within a year or two of the web's founding. His preserved works at the Internet archive are as old as the archive itself.
In recent years he has increasingly focused on being a student of Orthodox patristics, and more specifically asking what is good for man, and more specifically than that, how to navigate a technology-laden maze when many mainstream options are ultimately counter-productive. His magnum opus, called The Luddite's Guide to Technology, looks at the maze and how to navigate it in a many-sided way, and over half of the preferred introduction to his works, C.J.S. Hayward in Under 99 Pages, are pulled from his extensive works on technology and man. Likewise, his autobiography is titled, Orthodox Theology and Technology: A Profoundly Gifted Autobiography.
With years, the transformational nature of the Orthodox spiritual path has helped him to grow, and part of that growth is being deeply calm, a contagious calm that settles on those around him, and has had some people wanting to be with him so that part of the calm will rub off onto them. For them he wrote Calm.
And he always meeting some of his readers, and you are invited to contact him.
A quote:
[Other name changed]
Christos [Puts hand on the shoulder of the father of teenage Adam]: "Adam hurt my feelings."
Adam [confused]: "How did I do that?"
Christos: "Fess up, Adam, and then we'll both know."
I have been wary of Western Buddhism as a sort of neo-Deism: a religious faith, if it may be called that ("Buddhism is not a creed. It is a doubt."--G.K. Chesterton: Chesterton could also have said, "Buddhism is not a Creed. It is a Dao."), where in its native element the ethical heavy lifting is done primarily by what a Western scholar might call a system of virtues, and there are fewer inviolable rules, while the Western self-identified Buddhist picks up on the fewer inviolable rules but does not do heavy lifting by its Path of eight cardinal interlocking virtues.
Nonetheless, a visit to Buddhism can be helpful in another aspect. Buddhism is arguably a stronger grade of skepticism than is prominent in the West ("Buddhism is not a creed. It is a doubt."--G.K. Chesterton), but when the Buddha's followers asked him if there were gods, he said that there probably were, but the question was irrelevant, because any [good] deity would have already blessed us to the maximum extent possible.
My first response, on hearing that answer repeated decades ago, was, "Well, that rules out the Christian God very quickly." My thought there was that the great skeptic's answer did not entertain a correlation between being blessed by Deity and one's relationship with Deity. The Christian God, said in the Sermon on the Mount to make his sun shine on good men and evil men alike, has something beyond desire to bless us to the maximum extent possible, but for how well the blessing works for us, it matters whether we cooperate with the blessing or resist it. The Great Physician wants to give us the supreme Medicine, but it matters a great deal for us whether we take the Medicine as directed or throw the Medicine on the ground and spit on it. A Russian philosopher has been asked that perennial question, "Could God make a stone He could not move?" and answered, "Yes; that stone is man."
None the less, I have been having a struggle with something I should know better than, thirsting for worldly honors. Or, to be more precise, a mad thirst for more earthly honors when I have had enough honor that I should know that worldly honors do not satisfy or make lastingly happy. One thought that was in my conscience was, "What would St. John Chrysostom say?" And without thinking of exact words, I knew what kind of response he would give: a good dose of clear thinking that would paint black as black and white as white. I thought of gratitude for what I have been given--and a next life in which God offers honors such as eye has not seen and ear has not heard. I did not think of it at the time, but also relevant is a post I wrote when I tried and failed to locate a copy of St. John's "A Comparison Between the Monk and the King:" A Comparison Between the Mere Monk and the Highest Bishop. Or, as the Holy Cross Hermitage's ever-kind guestmaster condensed the entire topic, "Bishops want to be novices!" Wherefore, being a novice myself, I should recognize the privileged position I already hold, and be grateful for the crown assigned to my role as a novice, rather than hanker after the half-eggcupfull of external glory that is assigned to bishops but is withheld from novices. (I also did not think of being one of half a dozen at a monastery which has the artisan's attention of an esteemed bishop. Perhaps it is glorious to give communion, such as my Aboot gives, but the glory is dwarfed by the glory of receiving communion, a glory shared between Abbot and novice alike. (And by the way, my Abbot is a high rank of bishop, but he usually doesn't wear the crowns he is entitled to wear. He seems to leave wearing crowns to the novices.)
I fought against this mad thirst for a while and was losing despite my best efforts, perhaps a cue to the wise that what I was fighting was not some confused logic but a temptation and a sin to be repented of, and found a familiar enough foul stench in that my thoughts of being happy through external honors was not making me happy, but sad.
And when I had struggled enough, salvation came. It came not from recognizing the particular privilege of a novice, in learning the freedom that is in obedience to an Abbot, and of being entrusted a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light when more privileged roles bear a heavier cross. Salvation came, this time, in a visit from the Buddha, so to speak. And this even apart from what the Buddha had to say about desire.
I would not retract any of my earlier thoughts about "Well, that rules out the Christian God," but casts a particular light on the Providence of God, but this visit from the Buddha showed that there is something of the Providence in the idea that deity, if such exists, will already have blessed us to the maximum extent possible. C.S. Lewis said, "We want God to change our circumstances. God wants our circumstances to change us." And furthermore this combines in an odd way with the Christian God whose Grace can bring Heaven everywhere, but we can if we want veto enjoying Grace and instead experience it as Hell. The point of this visit from Buddhism is not really a point about the Grace available in my own particular circumstances, but about all circumstances in general, or rather a point about every particular circumstance. Until we have grown enough, and perhaps even then, the demons tempt us to ungratitude towards circumstances in which God has already blessed to the maximum effect possible, save our accepting and realizing His Providence as the Maximum Providence of God the Spiritual Father, of a God who cares for each of us more than an a mortal spiritual father takes care for his charges, of a God who however much our Plan A fails, and then Plan B, and Plan C, and so on down the alphabet, remains a God who is always dealing with us on Plan A. It can be easier to see this Providence years after the fact, to realize what painful circumstances gave you and what God saved you from by taking away what you wanted to pray for. And with effort, God can help us realize his Plan A for us where we are here and now. But the temptation is just that: a temptation, a hook of Hell designed to take away as much as possible our happiness in circumstances in which God has blessed us to the maximum extent possible save possibly our consent, and is building here on earth the foundation and substance of an eternal glory.
Dumber and Dumberer
And really, what had brought on this temptation, or rather immediately triggered it in my immaturity, was one of the magazines freely given our Abbot, a magazine offering trite coverage of an English Princess, who said, "Someday I will be Queen," "is 7 but thinks she is 17," and "speaks four languages," "is at the head of her class," and something about being a style icon. I would briefly comment on what I was coveting in her royal privilege:
"Someday I will be Queen!"
Before and also now, I consider bare membership among the faithful of the Orthodox Church to outclass primacy in the Church of England.
And I am trying to cooperate with God in reaching Heaven, in glory so great that we are advised not to think too much of our glorified state. And, further, I recall St. Rostislav: "I have heard of how Constantine, great among kings, appeared to a certain Elder and said, 'If I had known what glory the monks receive in heaven... I would have taken off my crown and royal purple, and replaced them with the monastic garb'."
One person at the Mars Society talked about asking people, "Who was the Queen of Spain in 1492?" The answer comes quick as a shot: "Isabella." Then the next question is posed, "Who was the Queen of France?" And to that I will add that armchair historian as I am, I do not know who was King of England in the days of C.S. Lewis.
One psychologist drew a sharp point of, "The average Harvard PhD has never met someone as talented as you," and I have been in the dubious honor of being so far ahead of what professors were used to that their social skills started to melt away.
Something about being a style icon.
I'm not sure that ever, in my entire life, have other people looked at what I was wearing to take cues for style. People have borrowed a T-shirt for me as an emblem of bad dressing.
The overall predicament I was in reminds me when I was traveling through a hardware store coveting ordinary Swiss Army Knives while looking for an impossible-to-find wiresaw a friend wanted:
When I had a SwissChamp XLT on my belt:
Conclusion
God has already blessed us to the maximum extent possible apart from the question of whether we choose to relate to that blessing as a blessing or a curse. In one sense, God has already blessed us as Buddha said. But we are the stone God cannot bless if we interpret His Providence as a curse.
There was something profoundly stupid in my coveting earthly honors, and that something would have remained stupid even without the irony, like the pears passage of the Blessed Augustine, of owning pears better than anything he coveted enough to steal.
Adam reigned as an immortal king and lord over the whole world. He had a wife like nothing else in all Creation, paradise for a home, and harmony with nature such as we could not dream of. And, he was like a little boy with a whole room full of toys who is miserable because he wants another toy and his parents said "No." And lest we look down on Adam, we should remember that I am Adam, and you are Adam.
And the content of such temptations is stupid: stupidity and something that backfires if we entertain them even just a little... but there is something to be said for temptations in God's Plan A.
Everything that God allows in our lives is either a blessing from God or a temptation which He has allowed for our strengthening.
God allowed me a miserable few hours coveting privilege that I might be strengthened, and even if things would have been much easier if I had not entertained the desire, he allowed me the temptation for my strengthening and harvested my sin that I might strike at the sin all the louder.
You wake up a little bit early. Do you want to spend some time playing the piano, or just relax and then go to work?
You: play the piano.
You can't. You could read music before you could read English, and you have perfect pitch, but your piano tutor early in your childhood told your parents you did not have any talent, and shut down your music lessons with her or anyone else.
You: go to work.
You turn in a first assignment and you know it was good. Your boss calls you into a meeting, says that his boss (who saw your work and raised no objections) was "livid" when your boss chose to protect you by saying "Early planning stages, nothing to show" on a very second day and would have been even more furious if he had seen your terrible work. You are told, "Your only two friends in the company are in this room" and that you should be "very afraid of anyone else finding out" about your sorry work.
You: go home.
You adapt a classic joke:
I was trying to help a friend's son look into colleges, and yesterday he handed me the phone, really excited, and said, "You have got to speak with these guys." I fumbled the phone, picked it up, and heard, "—online. We offer perhaps the best-rounded of degrees, and from day one our students are equipped with a top-of-the-line Dell running up-to-the-minute Vista. Besides the ins and outs of Office 2007, we address back-end issues, giving students a grounding in Visual Basic .NET, striking the right balance between 'reach' and 'rich,' and a thorough groundings in Flash-based design and web design optimized for the Internet Explorer 6. Throw in an MCSE, and marketing-based communication instruction that harnesses the full power of PowerPoint and covers the most effective ways to make use of animated pop-ups, opt-in subscriber lists, and—"
I interrupted. "Internet Exploder 6? Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Exp—excuse me, but what is your organization called?"
I have generally found efforts to improve a backwards Philokalia of themselves backwards, not to mention a bit stupid and arrogant. The Seven Deadly Sins are what became in the West of the Philokalia's eight demons, and I have read an official from my own theology department frankly ridicule the Seven Deadly Sins because it does not explicitly list hypocrisy. But in the Philokalia at least, the eight demons are the eight gateway sins, eight gateway drugs to other sins, and hypocrisy falls at least partly under the heading of pride, unreservedly condemned as the worst of the lot. The list of eight sins is not an attempt to catalogue each and every sins; another passage of the Philokalia attempts a catalogue and the list weighs in at over 100 named sins. However, this exercise is exceedingly rare compared to the efforts to warn us of gateway sins, of which a few the reader is warned about repeatedly. People who consider themselves to know better than the Philokalia have my suspicion and ordinarily seem to never have really gotten their feet wet in what is quite arguably the #1 Orthodox written treasure after the Bible.
I was surprised when my abbot (at least for now, and I hope it doesn't just last for now and evaporate), Metropolitan JONAH of St. Demetrios Monastery, proposed an update as part of his Reflections on a Spiritual Journey. However unstintingly poor classic monasticism may have insisted on being (one passage gives a short list of allowed items and beyond them "not even a needle"), those who became monastics came from privileges that not only included a great deal of wealth and being born into the Old Boy's Club, but could assume loving and healthy extended families. And maybe the spoiled rich could and should have regarded forms of pride as the nadir of human defilement, and perhaps such it is. In both East and West, in for example St. Seraphim of Sarov or G.K. Chesterton, fornication and drunkenness are considered the sins of men, and pride and rebellion are considered the sins of devils. And the little future St. Seraphim did not need to be cleansed from all human sin, but he absolutely needed to overcome the sin of devils.
However, Metropolitan JONAH points to certain differences today. The extended family has not stayed together but disintegrated into isolated nuclear families, and nuclear families have had a meltdown too. And so many people today have grown up with a broken childhood, with a whole array of situations that were abusive even if squeaky-clean legal (like Mom and Dad outsourcing most of their parenting to a series of daycare centers so they can both bring home the bacon), and the effect of suchlike abuse is a profound shame, a shame that people discover can be anaesthetized, at least temporarily, by engaging in various sins. Addictions, and things like addictions such as various sexual sins, anaesthetize a shame that says, "You're worthless. There's nothing left to love. You are horrible through and through." And so my beloved Metropolitan, whom I am positive understands the Philokalia profoundly, has offered the first update to the Philokalia that I have found to even make sense—and it is a lot of sense that it makes.
A visit to Fr. John
Fr. John Whiteford, whom I have had the privilege of taking two classes with, is another figure I respect profoundly. He is something like a bulldog for Orthodoxy, with topics such as "The anus is not designed for the penis," and he defends Orthodoxy in something like the fashion of previous bulldogs like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. (While he writes well, I don't know if he is as epically good as a writer, but I have no hesitation in making the comparison in outlining the type of work by which he serves.) And he called to point an Orthodox Matushka ("Mommy"), meaning a priest's or deacon's wife (which in Orthodoxy is a real office), for saying that the cure for shame is empathy without whispering a word about repentance. And I have shouted a great many words about repentance as Heaven's best-kept secret, but while the Mommy may have left out something important, she also kept in something important.
What was she right about?
There is an absolutely ancient image that has been repeated across centuries for the image of God in us, an image that cannot be damaged or destroyed. Our heart of hearts is like a mirror at the base of a fountain. The waters may be dirty; they may cloud or hide the mirror at the bottom, but there is a real and authentic mirror, and it will shine if the water is cleared up.
John Calvin is perhaps a most extreme example of Western abandonment of this understanding. His successor's formulation of the essentials of Calvinist Christianity opens with a 'T' for "total depravity," that we are profoundly corrupt all the way down to our very core. And Orthodoxy says no to this: in our very hearts is the image of God which is absolutely incapable of being deformed, dissolved, or destroyed. And to pull one example, St. Maximus the Confessor briefly speaks of adding to "the natural good of image" with "the voluntary good of likeness." The term "human nature" as I encountered it as an Evangelical was always seen as something fallen; to admit "human nature" is to admit weakness, fallenness, sin. But the nature of human race was never created as fallen, and the natural good of image is incorruptible. It is not a spark of God, as in Origenism and Hinduism, but it is something created which is incorruptibly good, and thinking it is a spark of God may represent an understandable confusion. It is an image, a symbol, in which the whole God himself is indelibly present. Not even in Hell can this be undone: "Hell," said Fr. Seraphim of Plantina, "is immersion in the love of God."
Now the dirt in the water may hide the mirror to a profound degree. St. Maximus's counterbalance to "the natural good of image" is "the voluntary good of likeness," and the voluntary good of likeness is of water that is limpid, pure, and allows the mirror to shine gloriously. It is a life's work to clear the water, and the clearer the water becomes, the more sharply people become aware of how much muck is still in the water, and the purest consider themselves the most defiled. But nonetheless even their defilement rests exclusively in the water above the mirror. The mirror remains as undefiled as the mirror that shone from Lord Adam in Paradise.
And where does gay pride fit into this? Or disability? Or, for that matter, topless?
The essential draw to all these spiritual diseases is that they self-medicate, and provide some degree of respite to the shame of being utterly worthless and having nothing good in you. And when the effect wears thin, it is possible that the sins of men can't sear away the pain as strongly as devils' sin.
And what about the profoundly gifted? What do we have to be humble about?
Let me bring one rabbit trail before getting on to my real point. If, in history, something goes wrong that leaves over a million murder victims, it is the fruit of profoundly gifted effort. Like Hitler, for instance, or the gospel of "St. Marx." The whole singularity in which the whole world is sinking has the achievements of the profoundly gifted as instrumental. No intellectually disabled individual in history has created a black mirror. It is Steve Jobs who does it. Profoundly gifted can and do things with such good intentions as pave the road to Hell and lead legions down with them. There is something in this that we should be very humble about.
But let me talk about humility for an instant.
G.K. Chesterton says, "It takes humility to enjoy anything—even pride."
Humility is the spiritual wine that opens the eyes to the beauty of the universe, and humility is the spiritual wine that can let profoundly gifted look at IQ normals and see the glory of the image of God at work.
"In humility consider others better than yourself" (Phil 2:3) has got to be one of the least palatable texts in the Bible (or at least unpopular for us to apply it to ourselves), but "In humility consider others better than yourself" is another way of saying, "In humility be surrounded by other people who fascinate you, whom you admire, respect, and enjoy." The Biblical text is more than that, but it really is an opening of the eyes to the glory of the precious other people in your life.
I do not know how to say enough about humility, besides saying in shorthand, "Read the Philokalia" as a shorthand quote. Humility ranks high on the Ladder; it is with discernment one of the two great virtues the Fathers in the Philokalia simply cannot stop talking about or praising enough. Humility is a powerful contributor to God-shaped love, a mother to joy, and it is a Heaven on earth. Heaven is where the saints are, and Heaven is where the humble are.
I don't wish to condemn too strongly people who reach for devil's sin when the sins of men cease to sufficiently anaesthetize pain. But really, even if we allow queers (or whatever they are called this week) to try to feel good on a lasting basis for pride, we might be able to think far enough the box to pursue humility.
And oh, by the way, people are less hostile if we are genuinely humble.
OK, so I'm a dwarf standing on giants' shoulders, but...
A life's work between two covers... er, almost a dozen pairs of covers with four to six hundred pages in between... that could nicely adorn about two feet of space on your bookshelf... a little smaller in size than the complete Calvin and Hobbes...
"Must... fight... temptation.... to read... brilliant and interesting stuff from C.J.S. Hayward.... until.... after... work!"
—Kent Nebergall
If you don't know me, my name is Christos Jonathan Seth Hayward, which I usually abbreviate "C.J.S. Hayward."
But my name has to my surprise trilettered on Facebook to "CSH," for "C.S. Hayward". As in, the natural successor to C.S. Lewis. I take that as a big compliment.
I'm an Eastern Orthodox author, who grew up reading C.S. Lewis, and has read almost everything he wrote, including some of those reviewed in C.S. Lewis: The Neglected Works, but have written many different things in many styles. Readers have written things about parts of the the colllection like (J. Morovich):
A collection of joyful, challenging, insightful, intelligent, mirthful and jarring essays written by an Eastern Orthodox author who is much too wise for his years.
and (D. Donovan):
Each piece is a delight: partially because each 'speaks' using a different voice and partly because a diversity of topics and cross-connections between theology and everyday living makes the entire collection a delight to read, packed with unexpected twists, turns, and everyday challenges.
And all this for some of this collection.
These pieces are a joy to read, and a gateway to help you enter a larger world, and open up doors that you never dreamed were there to open. Want to really see how "There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy?" Read these.
This little library includes nearly everything I’ve written--roughly 365 works in 12 volumes. The works in each volume are quite varied and most are short.) I omit software projects and the occasional interactive webpage. What all is offered? Works in this series include: novellas, short stories, poems and prayers, articles, and humor.
The one single work I would recommend most by far, and has been strongly recommended by others, is The Consolation of Theology. It is based on a classic The Consolation of Philosophy, and it is meant to give consolation, joy, strength, insights and things that are beyond mere insight. In a pandemic, a collapsing economy, and times when grandmas are buying shotguns, and perhaps other things in the pipeline, happiness is possible, in our reach, and it is real.
My story includes Protestant origins and a progressive discovery of Orthodox Christianity. Because this is a collection of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I have set the works I would particularly recommend in bold in the Table of Contents.
I've also dropped the specified price per volume from $29.99 to $19.99.
(Please note: In the past, a bug prevented an avid reader furious he couldn't read more than the first half of the Kindle edition. The Kindle edition has one review at one star, from someone who read the first half of the book and was infuriated he couldn't read further. I've since fixed that bug, but the review is live and probably deterring people from purchasing. I can and do write well-received titles.)
You can always just buy the first one. (And maybe buy other volumes one at a time if you like it.)
You want to own this in paper!
I'd also like to make available downloads for cheap or for free, but I have a reason for posting this now. I want to keep my website, which has been online since the end of the 20th century, alive for however long I really can, but there are some things I can't control and I am getting ready, I hope, to visit a monastery. What comes of that I don't know, but I'd really like for you to own my books in paper. And I'm not sure how long it will be until Amazon makes a decision that will render my works no longer available. However, as a complement to the availability of paper books, I have available:
(One note:) I had hoped to make a free download available in Kindle and ePub, as well as an option of spending a few dollars on Amazon. However, one of the latest additions reads:
Dear Reader;
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways. integer overflow error at 0x0
And when I tried to convert the text to an ePub to distribute freely, the conversion software errored out saying it had reached maximum recursion depth.
(The last two especially have so much content that they are bulky and incredibly unwieldy. If you'd like to just cut to the chase, read The Luddite's Guide to Technology.)
At various points in Trump's presidency, my mother would sit down with me and condescend to enlighten me from my naive views of politics, and explain to me Trump's feet of clay. At one point I told her that she had never during Barack Obama's eight years of presidency sat down with me to enlighten me about President Obama's weaknesses. She seemed shocked that I spoke of Barack Obama as having weaknesses, and said that he was so eloquent. I simply said that I had never and nowhere heard a conservative impugn Barack Obama's abilities as a public speaker. She positively bristled when I said he had ties to Islam. (I held my peace about a bumper sticker I saw a few times that depicted Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama side-by-side and said, "They both gave great speeches.")
The one possible critique I can think of Obama's public speaking performance is that he held his cards too close to his vest. When in debates between him and McCain both candidates were asked when life begins, Obama answered, "Go to Hell!" poetically refused to answer the question, saying that that was a question for scientists and theologians that was simply above his pay grade. (Obama retains a master diplomat's ability to tell you to go to Hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.) McCain answered the question: "Conception." By so doing he doubtless lost a number of people, but McCain answered the question instead of throwing sand in his audience's eyes. Much of the American public take campaign promises with a 40 pound block of salt, and the term "campaign promises" connotes that promises made when campaigning are not taken seriously as binding moral commitments. However, one of the pillars of political campaign speeches is an obligation to disclose what programs, policies, priorities, and positions a vote for the candidate will be voting for. But that is still the only objection I can even now think of to Barack Obama's public speaking performance; I suppose that if I watched Fox News (I usually try to avoid all television news and all television), I could find some criticism somewhere that Obama was not charismatic enough or that he failed to give electrifying speeches that drew many people in. However, as far as I am concerned, alleging incompetence in writing, crafting, and delivering speeches that drew people in is off the agenda for serious discussion on the right, left, and center. I may have heard a monk express a criticism during Obama's presidency of "I still don't know what he believes." Denying that Obama made well-executed speeches that attracted people is simply off the agenda, and I have never heard a conservative argue that Obama was not charismatic enough as a speaker or leader.
On the question of origins, which I really only bring in for analogy, concerns origins positions among conservative Orthodox. As far as origins goes (see QUICK! What's Your Opinion About Chemistry?), I regard my position as having liabilities. I have run into people who have to have a perfect origins positions without liabilities, and they end up convinced that the position they settle on has no faults at all, and in my opinion usually a worse origins position needing, perhaps, that the universe be only a few thousand years old in a position that comes unglued if you become convinced that the universe is billions of years old. If you know that your position on origins has liabilities, you can meet challenges without becoming unglued; you may change your mind about certain things, but there is much less danger that a rough blow may make you lose all faith.
I have never issued a vote meant to declare which candidate was the angel and which was the demon, and I have tended to assume that a vote for anyone I genuinely favored could only be a (de facto) protest vote, with scarcely more nor less traction in the electoral college than voting for Kermit the Frog. All of the elections I have faced have been a matter of finite choices, between two or possibly three candidates that have a fighting chance of winning the election, both of whom have strengths and liabilities.
If you want to know when I mentally checked out from my mother's condescension to enlighten me about Trump's faults, it was right after the election, when she recounted with white-hot anger (when she is beyond furious, she has a big unhappy smile, and she had a big unhappy smile then) about how Hilary Clinton had won the popular vote even if the electoral college had gone with Trump, down to reciting the exact count of popular votes for each candidate, down to the last digits. (This is part of why I jurisprudentially accept the electoral college, but I really wince when a Democrat wins the popular vote while a Republican wins the electoral vote.) After that point with my Mom, it simply didn't occur to me that her attempts to enlighten me about Trump's feet of clay corresponded to anything out of the ordinary; I would have been more able to take such condescensions seriously if she acknowledged legitimate faults on the part of Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, like an allegation I had heard that President Obama used the Internal Revenue Service as an Infernal Revenue Service that made Christian charities waste millions of dollars on legal self-defense to keep out of to jail. So far, however, I never remember her owning up to a fault or downside to a Democratic president or candidate, even on a small scale. And I have seen the same white-hot smiling anger that her educated brother believes that what he believes to be literal murder on an epic scale is simply not one political issue among others.
I now hope that Trump is successfully impeached; my pro-life convictions do not allow me to regard a willingness to start a civil war to hold on to power as anything but beyond the pall. I note with sadness that while only one Republican publicly opposed a unanimous consent for Pence to invoke the 25th amendment, a majority (or for that matter anything more than a small handful) appear to be failing to push for Trump's impeachment. I have a bit of political, jurisprudential squeamishness about invoking the 25th amendment as suggested, as I had political, jurisprudential squeamishness about Illinois handling Blavojevich's impeachment as being driven by concerns of tremendous unpopularity and not by what would make good precedent legally. I am wary of invoking the 25th amendment to do the job impeachment was made for. But I do believe impeachment is called for, and I am if not especially surprised, at least saddened that after only one Republican blocked unanimous consent for 25th amendment applications, most Republicans are failing to push for impeachment.
Alexander Solzhinitsyn, on the way to seeing the limits of what revolution can accomplish, wrote, "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil." (source—seemingly worth reading).
My next post after reading about Trump's inciting the riot was:
What Is Wrong With the World
G.K. Chesterton wrote a letter to the editor after a newspaper requested answers to the question, "What is wrong with the world?"
His answer, "Sir, I am." was the shortest letter to the editor in newspaper history.
St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Seraphim of Sarov said, "Acquire a spirit of peace within yourself, and ten thousand around you will be saved."
Everybody has an opinion about what needs to change after the riot.
Fortunately, with me the one political necessity is within my power: to recognize that "It is a trustworthy saying, 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief,'" and to repent of my sins and take them to confession.
(It may be noted that a book contest to come up with the most politically incorrect book was won by a book about Orthodox priest and monk Fr. Seraphim of Plantina: Not of This World, which was pointed out to be barely political enough to be politically incorrect: but the best politics are in fact not of this world.)
But I am preparing for something tomorrow that is more political than my voting.
I am going to confession and own up to my sin as best as I can. And try to do better.
I said to my family, after a Sunday afternoon session where I had been the minority voice, that in the last election Hilary Clinton had always been portrayed with photographs that caught her at her most photogenic, and Donald Trump had always been portrayed in singularly unflattering photographs that looked to me like still photographs from speeches (people who have normal facial and verbal expression have their faces briefly contort to odd-looking expressions, and this is not a specific phenomenon of right, left, or center: a high-quality capture of anyone giving a normal speech on any topic—political or Toastmasters—will have some awfully unflattering still images). Afterwards, I wished I had not said such at the time, and to partly wipe a stain off my face wrote afterwards:
The recent events have been sinking in, and I am now with the Republicans as well as Democrats who broke out in applause after the vote was officially registered.
I now hope Trump is successfully impeached.
Some people may wonder why it took me so long for me to figure out that Trump was not high enough quality to step down after losing an election. The main thing I would say is this:
After attending a liberal Roman university, I commented to the monk I mentioned earlier that I had read First Things, a Roman neo-conservative journal of religion and public life, and I also heard what liberal Romans asserted about Roman neo-conservatives, and I could not deny any individual assertion, really, but they nonetheless gave a roadmap that I couldn't really connect with any of my reading neo-conservatives in their own words. The monk I was speaking with commented that it's easier to write off the other party's members if you stereotype them.
I have noticed that certain candidates rightly perceived as threats by the left (Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump), not long after receiving mainstream attention, had journalism consistently portraying them as stupid. It is His Majesty's loyal opposition's sworn duty to oppose, and it is mainstream journalism's unsworn duty to make conservative politicians who represent a threat look stupid. So when Donald Trump started getting an incredibly hostile reception in the media, my thought was simply "I don't know what his strengths and weaknesses are; I haven't seen the minority report."
That there was hostile coverage of the present conservative President was not any kind of useful information.
I had a conversation with my brother who was and wanted to be somewhat left of center, but wanted to be a bit of an omnivore as far as his intake on current events, and he said with some sadness that on the left he could find coverage almost anywhere from centrist left to far left, but on the right it is difficult to find media coverage between the center and the far right. He can presumably watch Fox any time he wants, but he wants to be able to understand moderate conservative positions and understand what other people think.
I wrote to him after that conversation:
You said that you try to get something of a representative sampling of newspapers, and you have lots of options for journalism on the left, but fewer options for representation on the right that is not far right.
That may be because the main conservative way of understanding is not on relying on journalism, even right-slanted journalism, but reading books and studying history (N.B. I [requested an inter-library loan] and ordered a copy of The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity). [My sister-in-law, my brother's wife] may be liberal, but she and her Mom's reservations about using Amazon for all purchasing is not based on just-exposed journalistic findings; it's based on a knowledge of history and a history-paced argument.
I am reading History of the Byzantine Empire and finding some relief in it; there's a lot of politics and it is a political history, and seeing some of the bad things that happened there help me be not dismayed at how bad some things are now.
I had also, perhaps in another case of "right lesson, wrong time," talked about discussion in a book about how a newspaper had given front-page coverage to an alleged gang of black militants taking over a hotel, and continuing to cover police casualties as the shootout unfolded, and then eventually having a buried clarification that there was not a gang of multiple black militants; there was one mentally ill black person who had been dead for a while, and the police casualties were a matter of police continuing to hit each other with their own ricochets. On that point I emailed my brother about the book that discussed this sort of thing happening in journalism and why one might choose not to get bearings from journalism:
One book which you might read, if for nothing else than a slice of [what has informed] my thought, is the ?1974? Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, written by an advertising executive who lost his faith in advertising and then lost his faith in television (Jerry Mander).
I did not mention First Things as conservative journalism, not exactly because I wanted to withhold information, but because I wanted to stress the difference between getting one's bearings from journalism and getting them from books. (Social media may well be a step below journalism, but I did not explore that; I never in the discussion discussed getting one's bearings from social media, from which I have mostly checked out.) Mention of that one journal might be helpful after talking about getting one's bearings from classic, non-current-bestseller books.
I went to spiritual direction and my spiritual director said something that challenged me to go one step further: get my bearings from the Gospel. I mentioned that one article said that a monastic leader had "cryptically" said, "It's better to read the Bible than the Internet," which I did not find cryptic at all. He was talking about where it is best to get one's bearings, even if one should pay attention to secular authorities about what simple quarantine measures may be advisable. And I was advised to back away from an unintended dip into social media.
It has also, incidentally, been commented that people who consume large amounts of (secular) media tend to be more secular.
When the Rush Limbaugh Show went big, I found it an embarrassment and I never found myself speaking with a fellow conservative who did not share that embarrassment.
I am still waiting to find a liberal who finds The Daily Show to be anything but a good dose of clear thinking about today's events.
I have mentioned earlier, not terribly impressed, that my Mom was shocked when I suggested she should have been able to tell the same sorts of things about Barack Obama as she was telling me about Donald Trump. In the interests of "Turnabout's fair play," I'd like to mention a couple of things I don't respect about Donald Trump, whom I held in light esteem for ages before his political rise. (To take an unlikely quote from Dorothy Parker, "If you'd like to know what God thinks about money, look at the people he gave it to.")
There is some talent reflected in his being a billionaire, but he reached that status through his casinos, and the vice of gambling is highly destructive. That's not an honorable way to reach billionaire status, even if it is legal.
I was also aghast at his having police clear the way by any means necessary for him to have a photo opportunity.
There was a long time where politics would be discussed at family dinner, and I would spend long stretches of time with something to say, looking for a social opportunity and quite often with my hand raised and emoting "I have something to contribute," and I was always, always shut out of the discussion by being socially strong-armed. I eventually sent an email asking people to either let me contribute to the discussion or stop discussing politics in my presence. They mostly stopped discussing politics in my presence at all.
There is some intimidation that comes with being profoundly gifted, especially an outlier, and I might briefly mention that while my whole family is very bright... but my SAT scores were higher than my father's SAT scores as a high school senior... when I took the SAT in seventh grade! Their social behavior conveyed that they were afraid of letting me speak, afraid that what I had to say might make sense. And that social exclusion helped me tune out what they had to say politically, because whatever they had to say, they were so intimidated, perhaps partly due to giftedness, that they abandoned simple good manners and completely shut me out of getting a word in edgewise at a social function specifically intended for family togetherness.
I might also mention briefly that after I was received into the Orthodox Church, at my next social function my uncle, a Protestant, "Orthodox Presbyterian" pastor, kept on telling me about "agreement" on all "essentials," and I simply kept my mouth shut. The minor reason was simply that I was tired, and my nonverbal communication should have been "I am not up for this," but the major reason was that even if I could summon plenty of energy, pushing and having him push back would not have been preferred Orthodox behavior on my part. He was intimidated, and even if I had plenty of energy for a lively discussion I believe I would have still been wisest to act as I did. After that single one-way conversation, he did not press me further.
It has, incidentally, been said that profoundly gifted individuals tend to be "very, very conservative, or at least populist." As far as why, I at least have had multiple cases of what a sociologist would call a "secondary socialization," and at least two of them have been secondary socializations that produce strong liberals. My best take on it now is that the standard ways of recruiting someone to the left work very well far into the gifted range, but are less effective in dealing with the profoundly gifted. It tends to run aground. Biblical Egalitarianism recruits via shady rhetoric and, sometimes, loaded language; the average gifted response is to be drawn in, but one possible profoundly gifted response tends towards, "That's loaded language," and shady rhetoric does not always catch the profoundly in its noose; sometimes it repels. The usual methods of getting someone to "get with the program" are often shady and often repel. Not specifically that all profoundly gifted are conservative; but profoundly gifted liberals and radicals will be more likely to be formulating tomorrow's political correctness than passionately caught up in today's political correctness. And neither do others' repellent attempts to get me to "get with the program" come from the left alone; see The Seraphinians for a response to a conservative camp that applied a lot of pressure to get me to get with the program.
In connection with asking my mother not to sit down with me and condescend to enlighten me about politics, I made a comment that "Master politicians, like master martial artists, like master chess players, do not take single layered actions. They can't afford to. This has the [consequence] that if you only understand one layer of a politician's action, you do not understand the politician's action."
When I was at the Sorbonne, my grammar professor commented that he absolutely could not forgive Mitterrand, whom he compared with Niccolo Machiavelli. (Under French electoral conditions, the person with the largest share of the votes wins, which means that if you have 40% of the vote and your opponent has 60%, you can win if you split your opponent's camp in half.) He talked about how Mitterrand split the right into the right and the far right, and effectively created Le Pen (in other words, a powerful ALT-right candidate who makes Trump look moderate by comparison; one comedy show said, "100% of the votes for Le Pen are bullet holes."), as a live and politically powerful figure. The specific means he used was to openly give real or imagined preferential treatment and privileged to immigrants, and when people were incensed, insisted that Le Pen be allowed to speak and that his speeches would be covered.
Hello, can we talk about the consummate rudeness of removing statues as a way to give the bolt of lightning needed to bring the Frankenstein of a vigorous and openly racist right-wing faction to power and life? The program to capitally insult Confederate flags and statues is not a single-layered set of decisions!
Some people may be wondering, "How can we get through to you people?" Not everything will work at all times, but I do have advice for ways to limit liabilities to your persuasive power:
Don't cry "Wolf!". Furthermore, don't be surprised if our ears are deafened if you do cry, "Wolf!"
White-hot anger at Hilary winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college is not advisable if you want credibility in drawing attention to Donald Trump's having feet of clay. And more broadly, if every candidate who represents a live threat to the Democrats' goals comes across in the media smelling like manure, be prepared for tune-out if you need to draw attention to something that smells like manure.
Don't assume that political views you don't respect are born out of naivete.
There was a profound degree of naivete in assuming I just needed an adult to show me a bit of perspective. I had carefully thought out views. Never mind if they were right or wrong; there was essentially nothing in my political perspective that was just because I didn't have someone prompt me to reach a better thought out decision. Also, if you condescend to enlighten someone politically, be prepared to be socially received as condescending to enlighten, and not have your points entertained even if the other party is polite in response to your rudeness.
Don't point out which candidate is the angel and which is the demon, and furthermore, if you do, expect turnabout to be fair play.
If you're trying to help someone see Donald Trump's weaknesses, be willing to be asked to see Hilary Clinton's or Barack Obama's weaknesses. If you're not willing, be prepared to lose credibility. Furthermore, if you want to disqualify Donald Trump for his sexual adventures, be prepared to disqualify Bill Clinton for his sexual adventures. You don't want to come across as believing that numerous cases of sexual assault are not significant to you in themselves, and only represent a card in your hand to play against a conservative when a conservative commits sexual misconduct. I held and hold a great deal of respect for the one self-identified feminist I met who was dismissive of Bill Clinton because of his sexual misconduct.
Don't try to manipulate. If you do manipulate, prepare it to backfire, with results other than what you expected.
The rumor has it that profoundly gifted people have a compensating weakness of "not picking up on social cues." I do not wish to state whether I agree with that overall, but I will say that to at least some of us, others' attempts to manipulate us stick out like a fifteen foot high sign in blinking neon. In short, some of us do pick up on social cues when the person we're communicating with is doing an absolute best to draw our attention away from picking up on social cues.
I've dealt with people who have it stuck in their head that I'm "not picking up on social cues," and who don't have any light bulb go on over their heads when I explain the social cues I am acting on. (Normally, when I am told I am "not picking up on social cues" I have been acting on at least one major social cue that the person criticizing me was oblivious to, and my actions make sense given the fuller picture.) I, at least sometimes, am very adept at picking up on social cues that something is wrong socially and that the other person is trying to manipulate me or the like. I do not always do this instantly, but something sits wrong with me when I am being treated manipulatively, and the effect is to drive me away from whatever position you were trying to draw me towards.
Don't misuse narrow social channels of rebuke.
There are a couple of male friends at a group that read children's books aloud that shut me down by misusing trusted channels of social correction when I was profoundly uncomfortable with our reading Patricia Wrede's feminist fairy tales (I would call them more precisely "anti-fairy tales" in that their whole purpose in being written is to attack what is right, good, and wholesome about real fairy tales.) Later on, the male friend who was closer to me had a live warning about something that was genuinely dangerous and problematic about something I was writing. He used, in what would ordinarily have been a socially appropriate fashion, a trusted channel of communication and was completely caught off guard when I blew him off. But it was a legitimate, trusted manner of communication that he had previously betrayed.
I would underscore "Don't cry wolf!" Everything I remained wrong about Trump on was an a point where someone had previously cried, "Wolf!" or otherwise destroyed credibility, but assumed full and unimpaired credibility before me when it counted.
Furthermore, if you do have something to say where cries of "Wolf!" have deafened our ears, you would do well to show humility and concede points. Don't condescend to enlighten a poor sap. Don't take charge of the other person getting with the program. Don't show shock at how horrible the other person's beliefs are. Cries of "Wolf!" get tuned out, and so does taking the posture of a superior straightening out or enlightening a backwards subordinate.
The one more liberal person who affected me most in my views on Trump was the same brother who expressed frustration that he couldn't find center-right journalism and felt he was missing understanding of how a more moderate conservative might see things. He expressed opinions, including that Trump was "an idiot," but even that was without deafening pride. More basically, he came over on some other business after I had sent the email expressing hope that Trump was impeached, and offered to be available for conversation, and conversation was precisely what he gave me. Warm conversation that was willing to disagree, but respected me as a human being and never tarred me as an enemy or half-wit. He asked me to understand a couple of points, including that Trump's efforts to foment a civil war to let him (let's call a spade a spade) Assume Emergency Powers, but he was open and presented his own perspectives as imperfect. He was the person I approached about getting one's bearings from media versus classic books, and I don't know whether my email was taken as convincing, but I did send it with a live hope that he would consider an adjustment to his approach to understanding people he disagreed with, and possibly even investigate non-journalistic sources where he wants to understand how moderate conservatives understand things. (Please note that I am not purporting to be merely a moderate conservative. My point was merely to suggest an adjustment of what kind of resources to research when he genuinely wanted to understand another camp, and complained about slim pickings that were not extremist.)
And if you aren't willing or able to do that, consider keeping your mouth shut. It's not just a good policy for outnumbered conservatives. Liberals who have kept their mouths shut achieved this: they did not drive me away or deafen my ears. And compared to people who have condescended to enlighten and straighten out my naive and backwards assumptions, that is really something!
O Lord, I know not what to ask of Thee. Thou alone knowest what are my true needs. Thou lovest me more than I myself know how to love. Help me to see my real needs which are concealed from me. I do not dare to ask either a cross or a consolation. I can only wait on Thee. My heart is open to Thee. Visit and help me, for the sake of Thy great mercy. Strike me and heal me; cast me down and raise me up. I worship in silence Thy holy will and Thine unsearchable ways. I offer myself as a sacrifice to Thee. I have no other desire than to fulfill Thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thou Thyself in me. Amen.
St. Philaret of Moscow, a high rank of bishop, unusually named after a layman, St. Philaret the Merciful.
It is not particularly unusual for a teenager to lie awake in bed and wonder about the biggest questions: "Who are we?", "Where did we come from?", "Where will we go?"
What is unusual in my case, as I wondered and tried to answer questions like, "Is there an external world?", "Can there be a perpetual motion machine?"—"If so, how can it get started?" "What does it mean to be '"Jonathan Hayward?'", "Am I a being of the same class as those I observe about me?", is that I was not a teenager. I was a little boy, too young to think about any of those questions in words. and so I worked out my idiosyncratic and even solipsistic metaphysics by thinking in pictures, and this is in fact my earliest memory.
People (some agree, some don't) say that a person's earliest memory can be illuminating, and it has been commented that this is an unusual first memory. I have read a number of people's earliest memory stories, and not one that I have read is like this. The one that jumps to memory is a girl saying she remembered her Mom holding her and then passing her to another woman, and asking, "Who is this?" and being told, "That's your grandmother." An earliest memory is normally a story, not to mention simple and concrete. I was a bit of an outlier.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I was born in 1975, a firstborn son to John and Linda Hayward, when my father was a grad student. My father studied physics, and my mother would go on to study the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. I was born almost three weeks overdue. A botch by my Mom's obstetrician meant that at my birth both my mother and I were fighting a deadly infection. I spoke in complete sentences before my first birthday, and at the age of two fell down stairs and hit my head on a concrete basement floor. My eyes rolled back and I did not respond to stimuli. I survived, but spoke slowly, spoke very little, and stuttered. My Mom prayed over me and the stuttering was taken away. When my father had graduated and I was one, my parents moved to Macomb, Illinois, where my father taught at Illinois State University (their homepage shows a young woman wearing goggles that are simply inappropriate for the work she is doing, a common syndrome when photographers try to make a model look scientific). A major goal in their move was to be able to raise me outside of smog. When I was three, my family moved again, to the house where I have my earliest memory, and where my father began teaching at Wheaton College, where he worked until retirement. He had studied physics, but worked in computer science, and served both as a professor and a high-level in-house consultant at Wheaton. He introduced me to puzzles and questions relating to what we found most interesting in computer science (e.g. a question about the foundational 'pigeon hole principle:' "You are in a dark room and cannot see at all, and have a drawer full of mixed black and white socks. What is the minimum number of socks you can take to be sure you have a matched pair?"), and Unix computer games, which I dialed into by modem.
Schooling from kindergarten on
I have fond memories of Lowell Elementary School, where I entered in kindergarten, sometimes dressed up as a cowboy with chaps or in a suit, and attended until third grade, when school and my parents sensed that I would do better at a specifically gifted school, and I entered Avery Coonley School in fourth grade, where the headmaster bent a number of rules and awarded me 25% of the total financial aid awarded by the school for that year so my parents could afford to send me. I was initially placed in the less advanced of two math groups (one year ahead instead of two), and in eight grade ranked 7th nationally in the 1989 MathCounts competition, programmed a four dimensional maze, conducted an independent study of calculus, and (re)invented recursion in programming and iterated integration in calculus.
After a brief class in modern algebra for math whizzes at the the University of Chicago which I didn't really get, I skipped a freshman year at a local school to enter the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, where I continued to get high ranks in math contests, ran a Unix server that did the work of a local and hard-to-use social network. and actively participated in discussions, and programmed a video game on my calculator. Someone commented later that this was the first video game they'd heard of where you lose points for shooting things, although I wasn't trying to be original. (I was trying to implement a game I'd envisioned in gradeschool.) In order to justify a decision, my high school asked me to take an IQ test, and the psychologist scoring the test almost fell off her chair.
The summer after my junior year of high school I trained as an Emergency Medical Technician at College of DuPage because I was frustrated at the shallowness of what I had taken in first aid class. I was also unsatisfied with the Emergency Medical Technician training, as it seemed to me then to only teach enough medicine to package patients up and ship them to the local emergency room, but there have been a few times I've used my training: once two summers later, in Malaysia, where I helped provide some faint parody of suspected spinal injury management in helping a motorcycle accident victim, who had evidence of serious internal injury, get to the emergency room when he was loaded into a nearby van instead of an ambulance. I also used knowledge about heat, years after that, to get an elderly dog to stop shivering after she was taken outside for a potty break and made a lethargic beeline to the place in the yard where the wind was least bitter, and stood there, shivering, until I picked her up and carried her back inside and did what I could to raise her body temperature. (I do not think she would have survived for more than a few hours more if I had not had that prior medical knowledge.)
I mentioned that two summers later I was in Malaysia. It was wonderful and I didn't want to leave. The rest of my family went there for a calendar year; I choosed to stay in the U.S. for my freshman year of college, but joined my family for the summer. It awakened a lifelong interest in culture and the many ways time can be experienced, but beyond that I would refer to a book on writing college admissions essays which talked about avoiding clichés that college admissions officers are tired of reading, which included pet death and The Travel Experience, which runs something like, "In my trip to _______, I met new people and new ways of doing things. _______ challenged assumptions I didn't even know I had, and has changed me forever. [And so on and so forth about life in _______.]" Please note that this description is entirely ambiguous about what continent, island, or space station "_______" was located on. Living in Malaysia was a life-changing experience, an eye-opener, and a delight, however I try to be careful to avoid stretching social patience in talking about my cherished travel experiences. Those who have already had a travel experience know what it is like; those who haven't don't want to hear me gush on and on.
I entered Wheaton College as a National Merit Scholar, but ran aground on a particular community requirement which, like others before and after me, some Christians are not comfortable with. When I stopped running from my conscience, I took the unprecedented step of appealing to the Board of Trustees to give a conscientious exemption to this requirement (no lesser figure had the necessary authority), they did not pay me the courtesy of letting the item be put on the agenda for consideration (they thought the voluntary nature of Wheaton made my concerns "evaporate"). The requirement, that Wheaton students don't drink and dance, has variously and inconsistently been defended by Wheaton leadership as "just social mores," "like vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity," and a strict requirement of Wheaton's conscience. I lay on bed at night, wondering, "If this is how Christians act, do I want to be a Christian?"
I transferred to Calvin with a broken heart. I ended up being able to take all of the highest-level math classes offered at Wheaton and also at Calvin, in totall a major and a half's worth of them. I spent a semester in Paris at the Sorbonne, where I imagined the cultures of my own fantasy world, "Espiriticthus," a fusion of the beauty I saw in Malaysia and France. I met my first Luddite, a man who commented simply that he would look into the window to the computer lab and observe that everybody seemed to be angry as they were typing. On a larger scale, I also had a painful relationship with a girl named Rebecca. In that troubled relationship, I am not interested in stating what she did wrong. I am interested, however, in stating what I did wrong. I approached that relationship, like life itself, as a department of mathematics. Meaning, as time passed, I did not relate to Rebecca as especially human, and I did not relate to myself as especially human either. Our relationship was mercifully broken off.
I spent a summer as a camp counselor and entered as a graduate student at UIUC, where I managed to get a master's in applied mathematics, with a thesis accomplishing one thing usually associated with a PhD: carving out a niche where I knew more than anyone else in the world, in this case opening a new subbranch of "point-set topology" whose implications included a straightforward but rigorous way to handle infinitesmals such as bedeviled the foundation of calculus, in an academic discipline where it was hard to find something new to prove. Nonetheless, my advisor, the department chair, told me in one prolific summer that he regarded my many emails (see a later writeup of one topic covered) as "mathematics fiction" by analogy with "science fiction," and he did not regard my math awards as indicating in any way that I was adequate in mathematics. He and one other professor approved my thesis without reading the second half.
Entering the work world, or trying to
My first job out of college, at an anonymous company, told me when I was hired that I had gotten the highest score on one test of any applicant yet, and I had gotten a perfect score on the linear logic test, and I submitted the best code sample they'd seen ("reads like plain English"). Then things turned a little odd. I believe the reasons were complex, but they boasted about the computers they gave employees then gave me what was apparently a hand-me-down, and more seriously when, in the interview process, I asked if I would be able to program in what was then the darling language in IT, I was told I would program in a language they compared to a Formula One racecar, but once hired, I was told I would program in a language that had a terrible reputation (one computer science great said that its use "...cripples the mind. Its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense;" lesser wits had compared it with a sexually transmitted disease in that "those who have it tend not to admit it in polite company"). I complained, believing in good faith that its use would be harmful for me. In retrospect I do not believe they made an intentional bait and switch, but there was some ineptitude in advertising what they advertised I would work with and then assigning what I was assigned to work with. Also, I think that is the main area where I earned my "not a team player" badge.
I was brainsized my third day on the job (they refused to tell me why...), and I was later told that fellow alumni of the company blocked me from getting jobs at other companies.
A few months later, I developed a terrible manic episode and my life was again in danger. However, the manic episode is less significant in its aftermath, where I was prescribed a year-long drug overdose that destroyed my abilities of mathematician. I spent a year of my life at my parents' house (where I am still), lying on my bed, staring at the light bulb, with nary a thought running through my mind beyond, "This is worse than watching television." When I saw my psychiatrist, I would inevitably ask, "When am I going to get my abilities back?" and with an edge of anger in his voice my psychiatrist would answer, "I don't know. You've had a major manic episode, and it can take a long time to recover from a manic episode." After about a year of this, my Mom dragged me against my will to a patient advocate group meeting on Wheaton College's campus where a fellow patient, without medical credentials that I know of, listened to my complaints, asked about my medication, and said, "That's not an effect of your manic episode. It's your medication."
I have incidentally complained about the provider's preferred counselor to work with a complaint I could have directed at the psychiatrist equally well: trying to get anything done better was "like a magic spell, where you have to say just the right words, and say them just right, or else it's all for nothing." (It wasn't, for instance, enough for me to tell him, and have other medical personnel he was working with to observe, that I was throwing up half my medication most days for a year. I had to make a request in just the right words, and just the right way, for him to prescribe the other form of the same medication which had all of the benefits of what he prescribed me, and no added drawbacks, but would not induce vomiting on a frequent basis.)
The hardest intellectual achievement I had made in my life was not some discovery; it was, after spending six months away from mathematics (including my semester studying French at the Sorbonne), regaining competency. I was never in my life to regain competency in research mathematics. Computer programming came back, but with difficulty and imperfectly. Humanities work, which I had always been interested in, came back almost immediately.
Picking up the pieces
After being on a less destructive dose, I took stock and tried to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I had had some rough times outside of academia; I would later hold one post for over a year, but I was fired after I reported a senior manager for harassment. I asked my pastor, who was also a professor at Wheaton College and one of the most charismatic people around, advice on how to get an interdisciplinary humanities degree, and was strongly advised to pick a single field and get a doctorate in that specific field: "American Studies" PhD's from a department he taught at, who had studied an interdisciplinary fusion of American literature and history, were incredibly hard to place. History departments wanted a straight history PhD; literature departments wanted a straight literature PhD. I applied to several schools, and Cambridge University accepted me.
In the time between employment and Cambridge, I had joined a group of Wheaton students and some alumni, close friends, meeting every Tuesday night at 9:58 PM for a reader's theatre reading of classic children's literature, and it was lore that students from that group would enter a tailspin after leaving England (and it seemed almost every member of the group found a way to England at some point). However, I thought that that simply did not apply to me. It was not exactly arrogance on my part; past experience had been that I simply did not experience culture shock on cue. I had experienced culture shock, but not when I was expected to, and when culture shock was predicted, I experienced nothing particularly like culture shock. I had, furthermore, already lived abroad, so this wouldn't be my first time outside the U.S.
New directions at, and after, Cambridge
There was a major crescendo of trial and providence involved in my getting to England; there were several distractions, and after six months of red tape and difficulties getting student loans, they fell into place one business day before I left. My college told me not to come into residence. Additionally, I had a growing lump by my collarbone and was very sleepy very often. Cambridge had admitted me for a diploma, not yet a master's, and after I arrived on faith and things started working out, I was diagnosed and treated for lymphoma. And despite all this, I succeeded. After further difficulties and prayer, I was admitted to the master's program, where at the beginning of the year I said I wanted to study the holy kiss, meaning a doctrinal study of ideas, and after reclassifying my intent as a sociological study of kissing that was not particularly edifying, I was told two thirds of the way through the year that my announced thesis topic did not fit my philosophy of religion seminar, and I would therefore have to change topic completely. (There was also some hideous confusion where it took all but two weeks to meet with my professor and fix the topic for my second compulsory essay, which was a two month project.) I pulled out the stops, wrote a still not particularly edifying thesis in AI as an Arena for Magical Thinking, and succeeded at earning a master's in theology as well, albeit with not quite high enough marks to enter a doctorate. I went home and had my tailspin.
Now there were several things that happened along the way; the biggest one being, during my time at Cambridge, my reception into the Orthodox Church. And I would like to tell a bit about one particular nuance.
There is a tradition in Orthodoxy for people of sufficient age to choose a patron saint, and take that saint's name. It is believed that not only does the catechumen choose the saint, but that the saint chooses the disciple from Heaven. I wanted to be called "John Adam:" "John" after John the Theologian, and "Adam" as bearing Sources of the Self's burden of pioneering a new way of life for others to follow. I knew at some level that this was wrong, and I should have recognized I was choosing those names out of pride. A significant struggle occurred when I was wrestling with my guilty conscience, and after long resistance on my part, I repented. This just happened to be when a priest was reading the names of people commemorated in prayer. The next name I heard was "Christos," and my surrender was complete.
The name has had some salutary side benefits I did not even think of. One thing I have found is that whether clergy are quick to dress me down for taking Christ as my patron gives me a highly effective early warning system for how well we will end up getting along. (It seems to reflect whether I am judged for obvious pride in choosing One above all Saints, versus perhaps seeing no legitimate way I might have been right in that choice, but still refraining from judging.) Now at my cathedral clergy are not happy about my name, but that came later, after I kept bringing horrible things to confession. I give no complaint about them. But social response has offered me a powerful and useful social cue.
As an author, I have usually given my name as "C.J.S. Hayward", and on Facebook, which is not terribly friendly to such use of initials written out my name as "Christos Jonathan Seth Hayward," which I thought would condense to "CJSH" when people spoke of me. I have been told that on Facebook it has instead condensed to "CSH," meaning "C.S. Hayward." Did I mention that I've read every well-known work by C.S. Lewis and most of his obscurities, and he formed me as a writer?
I might also mention that there is more besides the number of times my life has been in danger and I've survived (I seem to have more than a cat's nine lives, though I have rarely been accused of being catlike.) I've had an awful lot of being in the right place at the right time in ways I do not that I can rightly take credit for. For instance, I built my first website within a year or two of the web's creation, although it would be over a year between when I first built a website and I ever used a graphical browser. I used Lynx, a command line tool that displays text alone. It is still a good way to check if a site appears pornographic before loading graphical view; not the reason why I made a nasty parody site called "Revenge of the Hydra," optimized for Internet Explorer, which if you load it, nine popup windows appear, and for each popup window you close, two more appear. (People on the Megalist wanted to ride me out on a rail for that one.) My main site, started in the early nineties, would grow to be a fixture of the web; when Google still published its PageRanks, my website had a PageRank of 5, a respectable PageRank for a medium to large sized organization, and was the top site in its category in directory.google.com. (I've won dozens of math awards, and hundreds of web awards.) It's grown since then, and in some people's opinions, it has only gotten better. Now I have worked long and hard to make my website a good site, but there was from the beginning a great deal of being in the right time and choosing decisions that would prove helpful for reasons I could not have imagined. I also published on the web when the tried and true advice was to pursue traditional publication. Now I am a traditionally published author; I've published two books with Packt, and they've been very good to me and I would heartily recommend contacting an acquisition editor for IT professionals who want to write a book. (Note to such professionals: the pay you receive directly from an IT publisher is a social courtesy; Packt pays more than many publishers but hardly enough to live on. For an IT professional to publish a technical book should be seen as a marketing move that will qualify you as a domain expert who can charge over $100 per hour for expert work.) However, while Packt is built to give structure to unformed authors, traditional publishing tripped me up, and my traditionally published titles are far from excellent and lower in Amazon ratings than those I've self-published. The core reason is that I do my best work when I am writing out of my heart, but working with editorial requests for major overhaul has been necessarily out of my head; I cannot summon or control my inspiration or awen at will. Even this work, alongside works I consider some of my best, is not the work I set out to write, though that is grace.
I wrote in another blog post that I believed I had experienced what I would call "fame lite." Leonard Nimoy, in I am Spock talks about how Hollywood has teachers for all kinds of skills they would need to portray that skill in movies: musical instruments, riding a horse, and so on and so forth. However, there was something that no teachers were to be found in Hollywood: dealing with fame. Nimoy learned, for instance, how to enter a restaurant through the kitchen because there would be a public commotion if Spock walked in through the front door. And on that count, I do not obviously suffer the consequences of real fame. I've been asked for my autograph, once. I've had someone call out publicly, before I entered Orthodoxy, "That's Jonathan Hayward!", once. I have repeatedly had pleasant meetings with people who know me through my website. And since then, the only new tarnish to my claim of undeserved "fame lite" is in recent years when a job opportunity was really a cloak for attempted seduction. If that was because of my website or reputation; I am not sure it was.
My thorn in the flesh: harassment
However, there is another shoe to drop, a scorpion in the ointment: harassment. To take one example, whenever I made a new post to my website, an acquaintance from IMSA wrote extended and intense criticism that delivered pain, took me down quite a few notches, and elevating himself even more notches socially. No matter what genre, length, or really quality I posted, he would, he would deliver trenchant criticism that covered those bases.
At one point, when I explained why his contorting and twisting of my words into an actual alleged assertion that rape is the victim's fault, followed by his giving me the most belittling lecture in my life, I explained where rape had come close to home and I found that the most offensive thing he'd said yet. He responded with another hefty serving of criticism. I asked him not to send any further criticisms on my writing. He responded with another hefty dollop of criticism of me personally. I asked him not to send any further unsolicited criticisms on any topic. He wrote, "Ok, I will not send any unsolicited criticisms, but I will take emails from you as solicitation for response," and responded by another king-sized industrial strength dose of brutal, judgmental criticism.
A forceful "No" cc'ed to helpdesk@imsa.edu stopped his criticisms cold, or rather I think that the help desk explained to the great liberal what the word "No" means.
I have not heard from him since apart from one request to list him as a trusted contact on LinkedIn.
I also can't say that I missed him.
This sort of thing has happened dozens of times, and not just with people who post a fantasy of their alter ego luring a boy into a car and being finished with him in under five minutes. For one couple of amateur psychologists, my months or years-long ongoing, repeated "No" was slapped down with an assertion that I was "sending mixed messages" each and every time, combined with moving forward with their attempts to help me with my (alleged) Asperger's. This kind of thing is why I made a T-shirt saying:
Autism Spectrum, n. A range of medical conditions whose real or imagined presence in your life causes numerous socially inappropriate behaviors in amateur psychologists.)
As far as underlying social dynamics go, in the Bible King Saul wanted St. David dead and sent St. David on a suicide mission that would require killing two hundred Philistines. St. David succeeded in his quest. Then women were singing in the streets, "Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands," which was about the worst thing they could have done for St. David's welfare. It really would have been better for St. David's political stock if the woman had chanted a cultural equivalent of, "David smells bad and his mother dresses him funny."
That was the point where Saul went from wanting St. David dead to making him Public Enemy #1 and engaging in extended manhunts after his first outright attempt at direct murder failed.
My giftedness is not simply from my genes, even if my parents are both at the top of their game. It is actually common for profoundly gifted individuals to have birth trauma or early childhood brain injury; such insults to the brain usually push a person towards intellectual disability, but once in a blue moon they overclock the brain and cause an intensification of overgrowth. I've had both routes, and however astonishingly bright my parents are, um...
I had higher SAT scores in 7th grade than my father had as a high school senior, and when I took the Modern Languages Aptitude test, the UIUC linguist who scored it said,
...and here's where it gets interesting. I've never seen someone complete this section before... Your mother scored in the mid 150's, which is considered a very, very high score. You scored 172. I don't know what to make of it. I've been scoring this test for thirty years, and I've never seen a score this high...
I was looking to avoid mentioning this, but my parents, especially in my childhood, surprisingly often dealt with me in anger.
In a moment of "I have no mouth and I must scream" after other unrelated situations of harassment and hostility from several other people, I gave my scream in The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab.
My quality of life improved remarkably when I learned that a "CEASE AND DESIST" letter Cc'ed to abuse@gmail.com or other authority figure can stop harassment cold.
Schooling: Another attempt
Returning to education, in 2005 I entered Fordham's PhD program. What I think I'd like to say about that was that it was a golden illustration of St. John Chrysostom's "A Treatise to Prove That Nothing Can Injure The Man Who Does Not Harm Himself." During that time, there were occasions where my conscience was extraordinarily clear and I ignored it. Furthermore, while external things may have been inappropriate, it was my own sins that gave them real sting. That a doctor took me off a medication I needed was not my choice. That I worried to the point of uninterrupted waking nausea about whether I would be able to find employment given that my work in the business world had been clumsy and my PhD "union card" to teach in academia was jeopardized, worriedly asking, "Will there be a place for me?" was my decision. Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger quoted in the NFL said, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality," and I suffered much more in imagination than in reality then—that was my decision, and not the decision of even the most hostile member of the university. Possibly I could have completed my degree if I had not ignored a conscience at full "jumping up and down" intensity when I didn't see a reason for what my conscience was telling me, and possibly I am guilty for failing to accept tacitly offered help. I washed out of the program in 2007. Perhaps the other thing really worth mentioning is what I intended to be my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote up in non-scholarly prose that one Roman reader called "the most intelligent and erudite" thing he'd ever read: "Religion and Science" Is Not Just Intelligent Design vs. Evolution.
The birth of a unique area of attention
Now I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about something else that has slowly developed over the years, incrementally and mostly imperceptibly to me.
Like others before me, I've bristled at the concept of "an idea whose time has come." My main use of it, as a programmer who poked fun at tools he did not like and tools he did like, was to quote a fake advertisement for Unix's "X Windows:" "An idea whose time has come. And gone." When at Fordham I read Vatican II's almost incessant anxiety to pay attention to "the signs of the times," meaning in practice to pay attention to whatever 1960's fads were in the Zeitgeist and take marching orders from them, I pointed out that in searching the 38 volume Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collections, I could only find three or four references to discerning the signs of the times, and never a slavish imitation of Zeitgeist; one of them simply meant being on guard against lust.
Nonetheless, there is a sense in which Zeitgeist is real. It is a well-known phenomenon among mathematicians that a major problem will remain unsolved for ages and then be independently solved at almost the same time by several researchers: hence mathematicians are advised that if they discover something major, they should write it up and publish it as soon as possible, because if they don't, someone else will get the credit for first discovery. And this is in what is possibly the least Zeitgeist-like academic discipline.
Gandhi has been popularly misquoted as saying "First, they ignore you. Then, they laugh at you. Then, they fight you. Then, you win!" and while researchers have traced a legitimate Gandhi quotation about how victory will develop if you apply Gandhi's satyagraha or nonviolence in dealing with people hostile to you, this did not sound much like Gandhi to me. Nonetheless, it has some grain of truth.
When I wanted to do research on the holy kiss, at first I was bluntly ridiculed by my then current Cambridge advisor; he responded by asking cutesie questions about whether we could find reasons to only kiss the members of a congregation who were the prettiest, notwithstanding that in England there is a well-established social kiss and "Greet one another with a holy kiss" does not come across as a shorthand for all inapplicable ancient nonsense in the Bible as it might in the U.S. midwest, where hugs between friends are within standard cultural boundaries but kisses ordinarily are not.
Furthermore, when I tried to write a dissertation on it, every professor that sought to guide me took my intended doctrinal study, and reclassified it as a study of a physical detail of Biblical culture, to be studied alongside other Realia like, "When St. Paul said to put on the whole armor of God and used a Roman soldier's weapon and armor as a basis for the analogy, what kind of physical weapon and armor would have been in his imagination?" which overlooks that the "breastplate of righteousness" and the "helmet of salvation" are the armor that God Himself wears in Isaiah. I drew a line in the sand and told my second advisor that I wanted to do a doctrinal study. He immediately pushed past that line and said, "The best way to do that is to do a cultural study, and let any doctrines arise."
To my knowledge I am the first person who observed that the holy kiss is the only act that the entire Bible calls holy (excluding one reference to a "holy convocation" in the Old Testament where a different Hebrew word is translated "holy"), and it is called holy three or four times. This is one of the highlights that I condensed into a homily, "The Eightj Sacrament." But then a few years later, I suddenly had people contacting me to tell me about the holy kiss, and people asked if I knew more than I had stated in the homily (yes, I did; the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collections contain something like a hundred references to a holy kiss, many of them boilerplate repetitions of "Greet one another with a holy kiss," in festal epistles by St. John Chrysostom). Earlier I was rudely enough ridiculed by allies; then I was contacted in response to my website to inform me about the holy kiss by complete strangers.
At the moment I would downplay the importance of the holy kiss for active study. It is practiced in the Orthodox Church; I have said everything I want to say; I do not seek a kiss where none is offered. I have moved on to other concerns, one other concern as I am letting go as Fr. Seraphim of Plantina is in the process of canonization (one of my books, the one that's gotten by far the most scathing reviews, is The Seraphinians: "Blessed Seraphim Rose" and His Axe-Wielding Western Converts).
I would like to say that The Best of Jonathan's Corner is what I consider my overall best collection across my works and leave things at that, but I am rather suspecting another case of "Man proposes, God disposes." The most important collection I leave behind (if any) may well be The Luddite's Guide to Technology. The topic is loosely "religion and science," but it is very different in character. "Religion and science" as I have met it, with one stellar exception, is about demonstrating the compatibility of timeless revealed truths of Christian doctrine with the present state of flux in scientific speculation. Science is, or at least was, characterized by a system of educated guesses held accountable to experiment. Orthodox gnosology (understanding of knowledge) should find this to be very, very different from how true Orthodox theology works.
With one exception, none of the Orthodox authors I hold dear know particularly much about science. The one exception is patrologist Jean-Claude Larchet, who raises some of the same concerns I do about technology, and does some of them better. Everyone else (for instance, Vladimir Lossky) shows little engagement with science that I know of. And if I may refer to the Karate Kid movie that was popular in my childhood, the sensei tells the boy, "Karate is like a road. Know karate, safe! Don't know karate, safe! In the middle, squash like a grape." The "religion and science" I've seen has a lot of "in the middle, squash like a grape," by theologians who want to be scientific (and perhaps make what I have called the "physics envy declaration:" theologians-are-scientists-and-they-are-just-as-much-scientists-as-the-people-in-the-so-called-hard-sciences-like-physics), but who almost never bother to get letters after their name in the sciences, which are genuinely hard. My own formation, in mathematics, engineering, technology, and science, affords me the position of the blackbelt who declares, "Don't know karate, safe!" Perhaps one blackbelt saying such things is needed!
Furthermore, my main concern from mathematics, engineering, technology, and science (all of which I was formed in, even if I've lost much of it) is not too much about science, but specifically about technology. I've experienced technology early; my life story and could largely be seen as a preparation for commenting on technology. And I have background in both studying theology academically and living it in practice.
Another dimension to profound giftedness
One reader who has studied giftedness at length commented to me that profoundly gifted individuals are often "very, very conservative, or at least populist." I had thought earlier that my conservatism and my giftedness were two separate things. They are not, or at least there is a direct relationship.
The basic way I understand it is this. Possibly I had a contrarian spine built by requesting a conscientious exemption from Wheaton College's requirements and leaving Wheaton College after it was not even put on the agenda. I have certainly had as much exposure to liberal recruiting, or more, than most liberals. But standard methods of recruiting gifted are less successful in dealing profoundly gifted. The university system has very effective ways of drawing in the gifted, and up to a point the more gifted someone is the better it works—but recruiting tools fall flat with some of the profoundly gifted. Much of the gifted range ends up liberal. It has been pointed out that the math department tends to be one of the most liberal, or the most liberal, department on campus, even though the author pointing this out (and I) have never experienced mathematicians trying to recruit to liberalism. I believe, apart from natural bents, that mathematics shapes the mind in a way that inclines towards liberalism. I stopped really trying to learn chess after I found myself at the Cathedral looking at my quarantine-dictated socially distanced space with regard to other parishioners in terms of what I could threaten to capture in a knight's move. That may be superficial, and it may fade into the background with deeper study. However, mathematics does shape the character, in the direction of what Orthodox have called "hypertrophied dianoia, darkened nous," i.e. "overgrown head and impoverished, darkened heart," and mathematics may do this in a more concentrated form than humanities which promote the same. I certainly do not see that my successes in relating to my ex-girlfriend (there are some) were due to my bent to take a mathematician's approach to relating.
Something that never happened in my formation in mathematics was that my advisor at Cambridge consistently tried to recruit me to Biblical Egalitarianism (he was a plenary speaker at at least one conference), for instance, by asking, "But what about Biblical Egalitarians, who believe that 'In Christ there is no... male nor female?'" and I would dismantle the live grenade, for instance by saying that "who believe that" in English-speaking idiom means "whose non-shared distinguishing quality is that," and second by saying that he was snuggling into the back door that "no male nor female" be cast along at least quasi-feminist lines, as opposed to recognizing that some conservatives (St. Maximus Confessor, for instance) hold that in Christ there really is no male nor female, but read it along profoundly non-feminist lines. (I think after a certain number of attempts my advisor gave up and accepted that I would not listen to reason.)
Yonder, which is a collection of works intended to answer and challenge feminism, might have been provocative when it was first published. Now there is much more than than the men's movement, which I consider opening men to feminist-style protest. It is mainstream for women to dissociate themselves from feminism and "Like" texts that challenge it. When the U.S. Supreme Court came out in rainbow colors, I posted a response echoing First Things in the discussion at StackExchange, whose CEO is an adamant gay activist, saying, "The question is not whether gay marriage is possible in the U.S., but whether anything else is popular. It has been established that marriage has no particular roles, is dissolvable, need not be open to bearing children, and so forth. Why suddenly draw a line in the sand about marriage involving a man and a woman?" It was censored, with a comment of "Not even close!" However, in the time since then, I have seen comments not censored about the whole policy violation of turning the StackOverflow logo rainbow colors for a time and flipping it to veer in the opposite direction, and so on and so forth, was in fact not StackOverflow's best moment.
C.S. Lewis has a tantalizingly brief remark in ?The Allegory of Love?, in reference to Spencer who alone receives almost undiluted praise in a book that is exacting of other authors, about how figures who turn out to be what some people call "ahead of their time" seem an odd throwback to the vintage past, when they first appear. Even Bach was respected in his life as a performing organist but not taken too seriously as a composer, because he composed in an area of music that had simply fallen out of fashion. I don't want to compare myself to the famous people who populate the most obvious examples, but in regard to what Lewis said, it seems that some of my portfolio has matured.
My critiques of feminism may still not be mainstream, but they are no longer so far off the beaten path. As far as raising concerns about technology goes, we have gone past the point where one very bright friend tweeted a link to Paul Graham'sThe Acceleration of Addictiveness and commented in only three words: "SOMEBODY UNDERSTANDS ME!" For that matter, we have gotten past the point where the cover of Time Magazine presents the Facebook "Like" button as a major part of our conundrum. Things that I said that were way off the beaten path when I said them remain of particular interest, but are far less provocative to say now.
When I tried to do a literature search before or during my writing of "Social Antibodies" Needed: A Request of Orthodox Clergy, I searched Amazon in regards to Orthodoxy and technology and was dismayed to find... my writing and nothing else so far as I could tell. Prior books that had influenced me such as Neil Postman's 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death and Jerry Mander's 1974 Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (one Protestant friend answered my mentioning the title in mock puzzlement: "The author could only think of four?"), were available and remain available today. However, an encompassing theological argument that takes into account today's singularity were simply not to be found.
Since then, times have changed, and I am not a lone author any more. I've learned a good deal from patrologist Jean-Claude Larchet, and what I've read from him on the topic is eminently worthy of study. I asked Ancient Faith to read "Social Antibodies" Needed: A Request of Orthodox Clergy, not exactly as a candidate for their imprint to publish, but to send to other authors to answer on the record. The response I got back was not detailed, but they said that they had forwarded the questions I raised for other of their authors to answer.
Two other comments before I drop this topic.
First of all, one thing that I can agree with one devotee of Fr. Seraphim of Plantina on is a quote that Fr. Seraphim tried to tell people he was a sinner and he was put on a pedestal anyway. I've been wary of being on a pedestal when I realized that I already am on a pedestal; God has just shielded me from some of the downsides. Apart from harassment, I have benefitted from what appears to be "fame lite." Possibly I may get put on a bigger pedestal, but I am neither more nor less in God's hands if God provides that.
The second one, perhaps a tangent, is that I am not mainly writing for success in my lifetime. Certainly I am not looking for writing to be lucrative; my revenues on Amazon, possibly due to Amazon's ongoing repositioning and reinterpretation of its contracts, has gone from about US$150-200 per month to less than US$10 per month over a time frame when more and more people have discovered my writing. I am trying to write works built to last, and I have released my books under CC0 licensing ("no rights reserved," meaning that anybody can republish it). This is an aspect of a long haul strategy.
Now to move on.
More wonders in Heaven and earth...
I have enlisted at the Orthodox Pastoral School, about which I have only glowing things to say. After health issues compounded by provider issues, I have asked to withdraw for the rest of the semester and re-enroll next semester when I believe I have good reason to hope I will be stronger. What they say I do not know, and I am not specifically counting on the measure of grace they have already extended to me. However, one possibility that is off the agenda is that God will stop blessing me because of what they decide. I would like to continue on with them, but if God has something else in store for me, I will just try and thank them for what they have already done.
The second thing is that I have prayed for years:
Prayer from St. Symeon for a Spiritual Father
O Lord, who desirest not the death of a sinner but that he should turn and live, Thou who didst come down to earth in order to restore life to those lying dead to sin and in order to make them worthy of seeing Thee the true Light as far as that is possible to man, send me a man who knoweth Thee, so that in serving him and subjecting myself to him with all my strength, as to Thee, and in doing Thy will in his, I may please Thee the only true God, and so that even I, a sinner, may be worthy of Thy Kingdom.
I am not praying that now.
Within the past month of my writing, I sent a polite email to a nearby priest and said that I was going to ask a blessing to visit the parish, when I realized that was not then an option due to the quarantine, and then I thought of asking permission to visit him face-to-face, when I realized that would not be an option for the same reason. But, I said, I wished in gesture to visit.
He responded even more graciously, and offered spiritual direction.
I asked a blessing of my confessor, and have begun receiving spiritual direction.
I have also been seeking for years to enter a monastery. That hasn't happened yet, but I have a live conversation with a monastery now. It apparently won't work out for me to visit again in 2020, but I have hopes of ending 2021 as a novice, possibly a "rassophore monk," also called a "robe-wearing novice."
A last measure in negotiations
The next thing is that in dealing with others, especially as regards difficulties with medical providers, the last measure of resistance I have offered is to let the other party have it their way and then let them decide if they like the consequences.
Earlier I came to the practice I am seen at on double the standard limit of one medication, and they decided to let me have my eccentric ways, at least for a time. But then they decided to relentlessly pursue strict standard dosing, and after a year or two's power struggle, I let them have their way and I was in rapidly declining health. I can still remember the sad expression on my provider's face when she realized what situation I was in: she was not in any sense happy that it looked like I would be dead within a year, but standard dosing was simply not conceivable as something negotiable, or a decision that was less important than my life. After three hospitalizations in about two months, insurance advised me to work with a doctor rather than a nurse practitioner, and the doctor found room in her heart to let me have maximum doses of two similar medications, plus another medication that would help. I returned to the even keel I had when I entered their care.
Experience has been that sometimes the only card I can play is to submit to being keel-hauled, and when I come up torn and bleeding on the other side, the other party figures out things it had not been able to connect the dots on before.
I went through that last measure again with the department recently.
I have been on a medication whose known effects include kidney damage and eventual death to kidney failure. I have been experiencing precursors to kidney failure, although not yet real quality of life issues; however, every time previously my providers tried to soften the blow to my organs by reducing my dose of that medication by one quarter, it seemed a cure worse than the disease. Kidney failure can kill me within a decade or two; the effects I was experiencing would likely kill me within a year. Every time previously, my provider did not like what my medicine was doing, but they chose maintaining my dose above causing my death in the short term.
This time, my provider decided to wean me off the medication already, which was having destabilizing effects, and furthermore to forbid me to even take a related over-the-counter medication that is dosed much lower than the prescription analogue, and furthermore does not damage internal organs, period. And I decided to offer the last measure of resistance: to submit to being keel-hauled and follow all of her changes to the letter.
After two days of feeling worse than drunk, I felt sober for the first time in ages, and have been writing prolifically.
More wonders
Before that happened, my writing experienced what I can only term a death, a religious experience I have forgotten, and a resurrection. My writing was growing scantier and worse; there was something morally corrupt. Now I am still not writing perfectly, but I feel younger. Decades younger.
I have also been involved with Toastmasters, to learn to better communicate with my neighbor. I participated, albeit didn't rise above local level, in the 2019 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking, and it is widely considered that the experience and preparation are worth it even if you do not place particularly highly, as I did not. I completed the Competent Communicator curriculum and have started on the Presentation Mastery path.
One of the things my spiritual father said in a first call or two is that we tend to think we have tried plan A (getting a doctorate in math from the University of Illinois and going from there), plan B (getting a doctorate in theology from Cambridge in theology and teaching, which would have left me saddled with over twice the major student loans I graduated with), plan C (getting a doctorate "union card" at Fordham), and are "going down the alphabet" in faint hopes...
I believe that if I had made better decisions I could have a degree from Fordham. However, I don't believe that God has withdrawn his care. If anything, he has given me a reminder that decisions have consequences, and a powerful reminder that placing reason above my conscience is not wise. At present I do not have the brand of PhD; I do have two master's degrees connected with Orthodox theology and technology from excellent institutions, and quite a story with them. I think I am the most blessed I have been in my life, and stand to receive greater blessings still. I would close with words offered from a friend:
“Life’s Tapestry”
Behind those golden clouds up there
the Great One sews a priceless embroidery
and since down below we walk
we see, my child, the reverse view.
And consequently it is natural for the mind to see mistakes
there where one must give thanks and glorify.
Wait as a Christian for that day to come
where your soul a-wing will rip through the air
and you shall see the embroidery of God
from the good side
and then… everything will seem to you to be a system and order.
I'm a bit unsure of how to introduce this, but I had a rough time at a university. (An appeal document was sent as follows, after I had raised questions about some things being sexually inappropriate.) One friend said a few things, including that she got a sense from what she was reading that these were "not very moral people" I was dealing with.
The specific university was one that has been treated as alarming by Orthodox. This offers perhaps a slightly fuller picture of what being Orthodox at Fordham is like and a life lesson learned in the process. If you are Orthodox and considering attending Fordham, please review this before you make any final decisions.
For what it's worth...
1. First experience of Fordham’s care
My first experience at Fordham was arriving late at night at the address I had been given as Fordham graduate student housing, and finding a high-rise apartment building with no obvious affiliation to Fordham, with a security guard who did not expect me and did not know of a connection to Fordham, and a room number that was in a notation that the security guard did not recognize as referring to Keith Plaza. I was allowed in, and began exploring, laden with two suitcases and a laptop. I eventually found the RA’s apartment door, but no one answered my knock. The reason? After I had confirmed I was coming, she sent another e-mail asking for another confirmation shortly before I left, and because I didn’t provide a second, additional confirmation that I was still coming, she had gone to Brooklyn. It was approximately three hours before I connected with Residential Life staff; the delay included an hour’s wait after I told Residential Life that I was outside my RA’s apartment and specifically asked if I should go to outside my apartment, but was told to stay where I was. Then Residential Life went to my apartment instead of my RA’s apartment, where I told them I was, and gave up on looking for me. My phone almost ran out of power with the number of calls I made before the Residential Life staff found me and took me to a place on campus so I could get some sleep before GSA orientation. (They took me to campus as they did not have any access to my room keys: the RA in Brooklyn was the only person who could let me in.)
I believe it fortunate that I did not fall victim to crime under these conditions. Someone who was alone, white, with heavy luggage, and in general not fitting in may be very unsafe in the Bronx, and I could have taken a false step, or had my phone run out of battery power before the repeated calls I needed to get the help I needed from Residential Life.
This occurred late summer, 2005.
2. A cold room
When there was a fire in my floor in Keith Plaza, in the summer after a heat wave, I was not able to access my room. Fordham did provide me a room, but and the thermostat was set to below forty degrees; the room felt like a refrigerator, and even when I turned the air conditioning off and found that the heat was not available, Fordham gave me a light blanket not meant to provide warmth and could not find a warmer blanket. The staff knew that my room was cold, and I asked, but they provided me with nothing much better. I spent a very cold night, when my body was used to heat, and in my best judgment after training as an EMT, I was in real danger of hypothermia: being lightly clad, with no more clothing available, under a light blanket, with no heavier blanket available, in a room initially below forty degrees, can be dangerous.
This occurred summer, 2006.
3. Professor A_____.
I found the response when I tried to befriend A____ quite traumatic.
During our interactions, it seemed to me that from the first piece of work I showed him, my Cambridge master's thesis, he dismissed my work without any recognition of merit. As a gesture of friendship, I e-mailed him asking for his comments on a draft of a homily I was preparing. The homily drew on his teaching (3/14/06).
His 3/16/06 reply, after what seemed a nicer beginning, ended: "...If you send emails like this to other teachers or other figures, they probably find it rather rude."
During the semester, I e-mailed him requesting accommodation for a disability (4/26/06).
After that point, he pulled me aside after class, and did not give me an answer to that question. He did, however, require me to change topic drastically enough that I had to start over on my paper. This was 4/27/06, one week from the paper due date, and my entire class grade was based on that paper.
After I had completed all the classes and turned in my paper, I thought that the class was over. However, a Sunday soon after (5/14/06), A____ approached me after church, and began to question me about every single other grade I had received and how I was doing in every class for which I had not yet received a grade.
This was before he turned in my grade for his class, and he assigned about as low a grade, I believe, as would not look conspicuous on my transcript.
I e-mailed B_____ after this and asked to have A____ leave me alone (which he has almost done). Before A_____, I had never asked an administrator to help me with any difficulties with a teacher.
This occurred during Incarnation to 451, Spring 06.
3.1. No redress with acting chair B____.
I sent multiple e-mails to acting chair B____, including my full logs. So far as I could tell, no redress was given, and the later surprises from A____ occurred after I had been telling B____ of difficulties.
This occurred during and after Incarnation to 451, Spring 06.
3.2. No redress with Dean C____.
After my communication with B____ failed to resolve things, I tried to inform C____ that there was a real problem.
The one response I received was a note from her secretary telling me to go to my department chair.
This occurred during and after Incarnation to 451, Spring 06.
4. Professor D____
There were several kinds of difficulties I had with D____.
4.1. Finding reason to criticize
During the course of feminist theology, she assigned primary sources. Of these primary sources, many made claims about how history should be approached; none of them drew on or footnoted postmodern philosophy of history so far as I know, and she did not discuss postmodern philosophy of history in the course of the class. However, after the fact, she sharply criticized my final paper for making its claims about how history should be approached without engaging the current scholarly discussion of philosophy of history, in the evaluation given with my grade on the paper. I find this sort of surprise characteristic of an ongoing stream of surprises I had in dealing with her, and that made it difficult for me to identify a way to work that she would honor with a high grade.
This occurred during Feminist Theology, Spring 06, although the trend of surprises I had difficulty reasoning with occurred during Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
4.2. Possible constraints to academic freedom.
She emphasized that I needed to have “a sympathetic reading of primary sources,” and I expended a great deal of effort later on trying to give a polite reading that focused on common ground no matter how hostile the source she assigned was to my religious persuasion.
At first, I set out to debunk sources I didn’t like; later on, I was trying not only to respond politely but to focus on the areas of the sources she assigned that I could best appreciate. However, only once during the entire second course did she credit me with “a sympathetic reading of primary sources;” otherwise, I was penalized, even though for almost all of the later assignments where I seemed to be penalized for not having “a sympathetic reading of primary sources,” I was trying to find what common ground I could, and be as positive as I could. Her parameters for “a sympathetic reading of primary sources,” more specifically sources which diverged from my religious beliefs at a very deep level, left me with no way that I could identify to be faithful to my religious tradition and at the same time give the kind of agreement with much of a source’s substance, that she seemed to mean by “a sympathetic reading of primary sources.”
In discussion of preparation for comprehensive exams, she gave directive instruction for the “method question.” For this question, a student is to be graded not on the content of the position taken in response to the question, but on the quality of reflection on theological method in analysis of how that answer was reached. She specifically directed me to be getting my bearings for thinking about this position from the set texts I was to be able to use in my answer, which seemed to have little in common with my tradition. (This was in response to a draft reflection I had sent her that drew on resources within my religions tradition).
I am not sure how thoroughly my academic freedom was respected. There were definitely points where her clarifications of “a sympathetic reading of primary sources” called for me to incorporate contrary ideas in a way that I do not know how to reconcile with my religious tradition.
This occurred to some degree during Feminist Theology, Spring 06, but mainly Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
4.3. Improving work and getting lower grades.
D____ consistently made criticisms that required more fundamental changes, and more work to meet, than any other professor I had at Fordham. However, while I could improve my work in the area criticized to the point that a criticism was not repeated, what I could not do was improve my work in that area and get a higher grade. My work had improved by the second class I took with her so that many criticisms were not repeated, but my grades for the later, improved pieces were consistently lower than the grade based on my work before the improvements were made.
This occurred both during Feminist Theology, Spring 06, and Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
4.4. Saying “vagina.”
D____ said “vagina” quite a lot. Her use of the word was both more frequent and more forceful than I have heard in other classes (health class and biology included), and from time to time she gave a slow and emphatic list of genitalia. (It was one of her more common ways of answering my suggestion that masculinity and femininity may be seen as spiritual qualities.)
This occurred primarily during Feminist Theology, Spring 06.
4.5. Assigned texts and sexual boundaries.
D____ periodically assigned texts which did not seem to be written with consideration for some male readers’ sexual boundaries: Luce Irigaray, for instance, or Tracy Pinchman asking the reader to be sympathetic to adults playing with children’s genitals.
This occurred during both Feminist Theology, Spring 06, and Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
4.6. Treatment of profound giftedness.
When I was doing a paper on profound giftedness, I was attempting in part to document that the profoundly gifted can have a rough life, and that there are some difficult things people don’t realize about the experience. She told me at first that it was an inappropriate topic, because “giftedness is privilege” (she heavily emphasized, in the reading, groups of people that have difficult lives, and seemed offended by the suggestion that a particular degree of giftedness could have difficulties appropriate for discussion—N.B. some of them were like the difficulties I attempt to document here). She was not open to me saying certain things even if I could document them very well; much of my revision was not to improve the paper in the usual sense but to kowtow in areas where she did not approve of the substance of what I was saying, told me it was inappropriate, etc.
This occurred during Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
5. Grade appeal of Theological Anthropology.
After my second class with D____, I asked her for a review of her grade. She refused. I contacted department chair E____, making an appeal based on my turning in improved work from my previous semester with her on the weekly assignments but receiving lower grades.
This occurred after Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
5.1. Not addressing the concern of improved work receiving lower grades.
E____’s response said that the weekly paper seemed to correlate with the grades. His response in no sense addressed my claim that I had improved my work and gotten lower grades for the improved work.
This occurred after Theological Anthropology, Fall 06.
5.2. A characteristic pattern.
This interaction seemed to be characteristic of a pattern: I have not yet been able to obtain redress for any grievance with any professor within the university. The university has been able to provide assistance when I have had difficulties for which no university faculty member was at fault, but not when I am having difficulties with someone within the university.
6. Referral to counselor F____.
When I visited Fordham’s Counseling and Psychological Services, I was told I needed counseling, and referred to the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, who assigned me to “one of our best therapists,” F____.
This occurred during Spring 06 and lasted into the summer.
6.1. Treatment of religious attitudes and practices.
F____ initially seemed to be hard to try to understand my religious beliefs, but after a certain point she told me that a religious belief was “centuries behind the times” (I had made it clear that this belief was at the heart of a well-received homily I preached, and considered normal in my community), and seemed to be trying hard to argue me out of religious attitudes, beliefs and practices, which she seemed to be holding to be guilty until proven innocent of being psychiatric symptoms (a concern she raised in so many words).
The longer therapy went on, the more of my religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices seemed to be under attack in her telling me I needed to adopt her vision of “progress.”
This occurred during Spring 06 and lasted into the summer.
6.2. Unwanted, unwelcome, and unsolicited sexual directive guidance.
As part of what seemed to be a major effort to argue me out of various psychopathologies, F____ told me that I should “use pornography and masturbate,” and in the last sessions, made me particularly uncomfortable by saying over and over again at every session after she began, “You need to be naughty.”
This occurred during the summer of 06.
6.3. Pricing.
Fordham had been told, and the Fordham counselor told me, that ICP would go as low as $18 for Fordham students. They in fact charged me $55 for each weekly visit, and when I asked for a fee reductions or other ways of reducing a financial burden that was difficult for me, no reduction of fees or frequency of visit was given.
This occurred during the Spring and summer of 06.
7. Referral to psychiatrist G____.
ICP referred me to G____. During the second semester in particular, I was concerned with my low energy levels and getting more energy so my work would not be hindered.
Because my then current medications were known to cause fatigue, I asked if there were alternatives that would cause less fatigue, but I tried to be very, very clear that I was concerned about side effects. I explained my concern and explicitly asked what side effects were anticipated, and when he said a rash was possible, I asked what percent of the patients experienced it.
He had what he thought might be a gentler alternative to two medications that were probably fatiguing me, and he said he wanted to try switching to one and then the other. But then without explaining why, he switched one medication and simply took me off another medication that I need: he told me I didn’t need it.
I went from where I was, to feeling a lot of stress, to experiencing stress to the point of unrelenting nausea and repeated diarrhea, whether or not I was dealing with external stressors worth mentioning. At the end, I was trying to find some food that I could get down, and was barely eating—a couple of hundred calories a day because I couldn’t really eat—and barely sleeping.
When I suspected that the medication change could be having adverse effects, I switched back to the prior medication regimen, and noticed a marked decrease of stress within days, and was able to eat and sleep at more usual levels.
The period over which this happened was the late part of my second semester at Fordham and the beginning of the summer. I was trying hard to get off academic probation, but I completed all three of my papers under stress to the point of nausea. One professor, unaware of my medical issue, gave feedback on my final paper and said that one part, treating Cyril Lucaris (he picked out the part written before the medication change) was “full and coherent,” while the treatment of other figures (dealt with in the part of my paper written under stress to the point of nausea) struck him “as impressionistic and poorly organized.” I received independent feedback from another person, before I switched back my medication, confirming that I “indeed seemed less coherent lately in your e-mails.”
This occurred during the Spring and summer of 06.
8. Professor H____.
H____, my professor for one class, mentioned that Wittgenstein put an ‘M’ in his journal every day he masturbated. I’ve lost count of how many times he mentioned this, as it became a running gag. He also used the word “tit,” always with verbal force; he introduced another philosopher as owing a considerable debt to Martin Heidegger by saying the new figure “sucked at Heidegger’s tits,” and references to an infant’s life included asking us to imagine an infant having an inner dialogue of “This must be… a tit! and this must be… Mom!” He also talked about a couple that “liked to lick each other;” lewd references to licking became another running gag, and late in the course he said that he was attracted to all kinds of people, but not to children and not to animals, although, he said, there was one dog that “liked to lick me.”
One specific running gag particularly bothered me. Fr. Klein complemented one of the male students in the class on his shirt, then a few minutes later quizzically said, “I’m sorry; I’m not supposed to do that. It’s considered sexual harassment,” before saying that he had a priest’s habit of absentmindedly complimenting women on their glasses. He never complimented a female on her clothing that I remember, but he delivered compliments to men on their shirts like the other running gags, and I got more compliments on my clothing than others, as well as the most involved such compliment: “I like the green in your ring; it really color-coordinates with your shirt.”
I say, with reservations, that the class was an introduction to queer culture. The other LBGTQ people I know have sometimes asked me to understand them but have never made me uncomfortable; he seemed willing to repeatedly introduce queer concerns in a way that could make some uncomfortable; hence a story of an old Cardinal talking about the adoration of Christ in the Eucharist, and rhetorically asking what Christ is saying in the Eucharist, and answering that Christ was saying (here Fr. Klein’s voice slowed and became even raspier, sounding almost like a gasp), “Eaaaat mmeeee!” For those who missed the painfully obvious point of the raspy “Eat me,” he drove home that in gay culture, “Eat me!” is an extremely erotic thing to say.
The readings included a discussion of how close to erotic, or perhaps erotically tinged, St. Anselm of Canterbury’s friendship was with his monk friends, and an essay mentioning “the solar anus” and criticizing other scholarship for treating the erotic but still not being sexy enough.
As with feminist theology, I believe my grade might have been higher if I were not sexually uncomfortable.
This occurred during Philosophy and Contemporary Theology, Spring 07.
9. Disability concerns.
I have more than one disability which affects my energy level and the number of waking hours I have available for work. This made things particularly difficult for the first semester, when my doctor needed to make sure I could tolerate a lower dose of my medication before going to a therapeutic dose.
9.1. No disability referral from B____.
After my first semester, I told B____ that I had several significant difficulties: when I wrote her and said there was “a monkey on my back,” she said, “You had a tiger on your back!”
She tried to support me, but she never did one thing a department chair might have done, refer me the Office of Disability Services when I asked her about talking with my professors about my difficulties. She also said she would speak with my professors second semester and ask for an extension, but when I later asked her, she could not recall if she had asked more than one professor to give me an extension.
This occurred during and after Spring 06.
9.2. A blunt refusal of accommodation.
Second semester of my first year, I told all three of my professors that I was dealing with difficulties, and did not immediately make any requests for accommodation.
At the end of the semester, I asked for extensions, and was surprised at how bluntly one of the professors declined to provide any accommodation.
This occurred during Spring 06.
9.3. No adjustment to major portion of workload.
The Office of Disability Services, when I registered, offered limited accommodations: I could turn in semester assignments late, but they found no appropriate adjustment for weekly assignments, and when they asked for me about a reduced courseload, Associate Dean I____ said that was not possible.
I was left, given a disability combination that has me needing to sleep around 40 more hours per week and therefore having one workweek less time per week to do my work, with no accommodation to the brunt of a full load of weekly assignments.
This occurred Fall 06.
10. Medical expenses.
My conditions make for ongoing medical expenses, and with Fordham’s graduate student plan, Administrative Concepts Incorporated, I’ve had more trouble getting payment than any other plan in my life. Before Fordham, I had never maxed out prescription drug benefits on any plan; at Fordham, I maxed out those benefits in months. I did what I could to take care of expenses, but the medical expenses kept me strapped enough for cash that I had to choose between paying for medical needs and buying books.
This was an issue for the entirety of my time at Fordham.
11. Fatigue after a dubiously treated ear infection.
I came into the health center shortly after Martin Luther King day during my last semester, having what I suspected was an ear infection. The nurse said she would treat it with both oral and topical antibiotics, but ended up only giving me an oral antibiotic.
That ear infection became a major problem: it lasted for over a month, and took four visits to a specialist otolaryngolist and something like three or four courses of antibiotics to treat; the otolaryngolist used topical antibiotics as being “6000 times stronger” than oral antibiotics like I had been given.
That infection had me more fatigued than I had been in a long time, and I still have doubts about how well I had recovered by my end of semester duties after spending much of the remaining semester trying to catch up.
12. My experience.
I entered Fordham as a survivor of religious harassment, sexual harassment from men, and sexual abuse from a woman that caused pain I don't know how to put into words. This has not been at all easy for me to write.
My experience has been traumatic. It has been traumatic in more ways than one. The long times I tried to reach out to A____—I wanted so much to befriend him—and the retaliation I met for my gestures of friendship, were infuriating. So were several other things where I felt like I was getting pushed down again and again. I’m really not sure how to describe how traumatized I was, or either the fears or the continued frustrations. I can certainly say that if I had the choice of repeating my experiences at Fordham over the past two years and repeating my chemotherapy and radiotherapy when I had cancer, I would repeat my cancer treatment, hands down.
13. Notes.
I have been under duress every semester I’ve been at Fordham. Despite several things which I believe have impaired my study, I’ve still managed a rising cumulative GPA, reaching 3.4 by last semester, and with my last semester non-cumulative GPA reaching 3.5.
Two distractions
I am profoundly gifted. To those not familiar with the psychology, it means, for instance, that I ranked 7th nationally in a math contest, or that I've read the Bible in a total of seven ancient / medieval / modern languages, or that I am deeper an author than C.S. Lewis, or, as one psychologist debriefed me, "The average Harvard PhD has never met someone as talented as you," or that I am "smarter than most geniuses" or whatever. There are people who would give me heavy odds of being the most talented student in school history for Fordham, kind of like The Immortal Bard. That I was allowed to wash out, even after appeal, is simply ridiculous.
However, I only mention this in passing, because I want to get on to something more important.
What is truly sad
I would ask you to stop and "listen" very, very closely to this point:
As far as I am concerned, there is one, and only one, thing that is sad about this story.
I insist that in my side of the story there is one, and only one, thing that is sad.
It's not that I am not normally called "Dr. Hayward." I'm called "Christos," eh? That's kind of bigger, even if it is only a name.
It is not either, more seriously, that in my opinion Fordham's negligence could have killed me. Possibly I am right, but I survived. And if Fordham really had killed me, God would have had every ability to allow me to pass away, in C.S. Lewis's phrase, "between Aslan's paws." As it is, I have been given something Orthodox positively crave: more time to repent.
If it is not a matter of my life, neither is it my career. While technically one can teach on an advanced degree, including a master's, I've never succeeded landing such a job, and informally speaking a PhD is a "union card" and American universities as a whole expect a PhD. I've been told that if I want to teach at an Orthodox seminary, a good step is to get a degree from an Orthodox seminary, and I am studying at my Archdiocese's pastoral school, where the faculty love the students tremendously and I have the upsides of academic study without the downsides. It might have been God protecting me from a career fighting academic bullies just a wee bit intimidated at my intelligence. (Did I mention that the seminary leadership has extended a lot of grace to me, including full tuition?)
Meanwhile, whether I have appreciated it or not, God has been moving forward with me. I am an author, and while Amazon is paying me less than 10% of what they used to, the single most lasting work I have hoped to leave behind is a collection of edifying books, and my expenses are met for now (I'm retired on disability). As far as writing goes, I have had a whole lot of being in the right place at the right time, and built a website to showcase and share my works that started before I ever heard of Netscape.I also have a bookshelf on Amazon, and I don't believe Amazon is being cheaper with me than with anyone else. I also have (mostly) what I have called "fame lite." I Am Spock talks about the real and profound cost of playing a celebrity character on TV. I've had a hieromonk tell me that other people have told him he should read me. So my writing enjoys some success, and I've invented things by computer: Grandfather Clock with Westminster Chime and a Soothing Tick-Tock—Steampunk Style which will sound like a grandfather clock if you keep it open in a browser window on a laptop or desktop.
Then what do I consider sad for me in all this: only one thing. I attended Fordham through spring 2007.It took me through Wednesday, November 24 2020 for me to forgive.
I have written earlier, decades earlier, about an idea for a film. It would start in standard action-adventure movie format, have the hero try to sneak in quietly and rescue a good guy, Plan A fails and all Hell breaks loose, and one of the villain's henchmen comes out after the good guys get into a helicopter, and the hero makes one parting shot into the villain's knee with a hollow-nosed .45.
Then the pace shifts to that of a European art film and follows the henchman for the remaining forty years of his life, as he remains crippled, and far worse than this, is crippled by a grudge that never lets go of desiring vengeance.
I wrote it, but I never imagined I would be writing of myself.
As far as what is really my due in a career as a scholar, I would like to pat myself on the back in quoting Stranger in a Strange Land:
"Ben does not speak for me. I am not interested in this lad's so-called rights. His claim to Mars is lawyer's hogwash: as a lawyer myself I need not respect it. As for the wealth that is supposed to be his, the situation results from other people's passions and our odd tribal customs; he has earned none of it. He would be lucky if they bilked him out of it—but I would not scan a newspaper to find out. If Ben expected me to fight for Smith's 'rights' you have come to the wrong house."
And indeed, a judge might offer me a tissue but would unlikely conclude that Fordham has done me legal wrong. Which it hasn't. My present regret is not that I am not long a professor; it is that I am not long a monk, or perhaps my own impatient chafing of the proto-monastic obedience of "Stay at home for a while."
Why am I telling all this if I have forgiven?
Fordham has made a big deal about its embrace to Orthodox. It's not as big a deal as it makes about its cura personalis that cares for every aspect of the person, but it's still a big deal, and Fordham seems to find it natural to expect that Orthodox Christians will agree with "The Church must breathe with both lungs" along the same lines as Roman ecumenism. I do not remember ever meeting acknowledgment that some Orthodox consider ecumenism the ecclesiological heresy of our day, or wrong on a lesser scale. At Fordham, ecumenism reigns.
Also, at Fordham, the gender rainbow (or whatever it is called this month) reigns, and a Fordham that sees Orthodox as simply being Catholics (and on a liberal understanding of "Catholic"), is not in particular a Fordham well-poised to understand why it is problematic to Orthodoxy to strongarm an Orthodox seminary into accepting a hieromonk who married another man. It is true that the "Orthodox" Students Studies Center received something like a million dollar grant to study Orthodoxy and "sexuality," but Fordham does not grasp or does not accept some very basic rules about what is allowed to Orthodox.
I write to offer a third, if perhaps lesser, piece of the puzzle. Fordham makes no end of a big deal about its cura personalis. They also try, in their best Roman ecumenism, to roll out the red carpet to Orthodox whose schismatic status is gently overlooked. And, in my opinion, Fordham has a heart of ice. I do not say that my experience will be every Orthodox student's experience, but I do say, "Know what you're getting into" at least, and possibly "Get your bishop's blessing."
C.J.S. Hayward, perhaps more honored by a Fordham washout than a Fordham PhD
Epilogue on Roman Ecumenism
Rome continues to make a big deal out of restoring full communion with the Orthodox Church.
It took me longer to forgive the many Roman authorities I wrote who did not even respond to my cry for help, with the exception of one priest and journalist who said it is futile for an outsider to interfere, and whose journal has not yet reviewed any of the books I submitted.
When I was at a friend's wedding, his father mentioned a surprisingly sick story about a boy whose older brother committed suicide, and for Christmas the boy was given a gun as a gift: more specifically, his older brother's suicide weapon. (I should clarify that my friend's father was not being sick; his conversation with me on the topic was entirely appropriate...)
In the book he mentioned, Scott Peck's People of the Lie talks about a personality profile that was characterized by narcissism and several other warped things; surprisingly, at least to me, the single defect the author chose to crystallize what was wrong was that they were characterized by lies. We tend to think of lies today as not the most serious evil, perhaps using an idiom like "not the end of the world." Peck meant something very serious by characterizing these patients as "people of the lie."
In one statement that the author does not unpack (probably more because he did not want to slow the text down rather than a failure to understand what was going on), the boy's mother said, with what I would call narrower entailment than implicature, "Most sixteen year old boys would have given their eyeteeth to have a gun!" This statement is, of course, in an almost literal sense true, in that literally speaking, most sixteen year old boys would be delighted to receive a gun for Christmas. However, it was in a deeper sense false and a lie in that it idiomatically conveys that it was reasonable under the circumstances to believe in good faith that this sixteen year old boy would have been delighted to receive that gun as his Christmas gift. (Interested parties may read me unpack an "emotional plea" with discussion of entailment and implicature in a dissertation.) Such lies, once analyzed, shed light on what is sick in the discussion. An (almost) literally true statement here conveys a lie; the "almost" does not specifically amount to deception but using a metaphor that does not lie, about giving one's "eyeteeth." Elsewhere the author complains about a half-truth that conveys a lie. Here I would say that no matter how literally true a statement is, lying is in the author's mind deeply, deeply characteristic of what has gone wrong.
My specific reason for bringing Scott Peck and People of the Lie has to do with something else, the surprising rationality of the lie. In his book, and in my own life, I might accuse people of lying, but I cannot interpret their behavior as clumsy, random, or unthinking. Scott Peck complains about the "cheapness, laziness, and insensitivity" of making the gun the boy's Christmas gift. I would speak differently, and here please do not accuse me of speaking against the spirit of Peck's book, even if I attempt "change from within" (as C.S. Lewis uses the term in The Abolition of Man).
The choice of gift was the result of the parents' solution to an optimization problem, of what under the circumstances would best advance their campaign. It might have been horrifyingly insensitive to buy him a new, bigger and better gun, but the gun they gave really leaves no doubt. If they had seen an opportunity to make the gift sicker by gluing camouflaged razor blades to the outside of the gun so he would (in a literal sense) cut his hands when he innocently picked the gun up, they would have done so. This was no mere case of giving an ashtray to someone who doesn't smoke. They could have given him, without thinking, a used Barbie doll from a garage style or a new book in a language he doesn't read. Or, for that matter, shaved his head and given him a set of combs. A gun, or more specifically this gun, does something else exquisitely well. It says, "Your turn."
Behavior that seems thoughtless or irrational, from people of the lie, is usually nothing of the sort, perhaps because we assume rationality is a rationality of good faith. So that gun is seen as an astonishingly bad failure in an attempt to give an appropriate Christmas present: cheap, lazy, and insensitive. It is in fact nothing of the sort. Much seemingly irrational behavior is in fact perfectly rational in an attempted solution to the problem of finding a seemingly socially appropriate way to pursue socially inappropriate goals. Behavior may be rational and sick, or rational and treacherous, or rational and warped. But offensive behavior, in a People of the Lie context, even or especially when it seems puzzlingly irrational, is usually rational in the pursuit of a wrong goal. I do not find the young woman's behavior mystifying, who behaved in seemingly inexplicable ways in receiving therapy. She had plenty of IQ and her behavior makes perfect sense as amusing herself by toying with, mystifying, and frustrating a psychiatrist. Her behavior seems irrational on the assumption that she was approaching a psychiatrist with the goal of bettering herself by receiving real psychotherapy. Once we discard the assumption of good faith seeking psychotherapy, all of her making the psychiatrist sexually uncomfortable (for instance) makes perfect sense as a very intelligent person rationally pursuing an inappropriate goal. (Possibly, though I remember no direct evidence of this, in her mind, she was killing two birds with one stone and getting even, after one or more people insisted she get treatment.)
Elsewhere, if I am recalling the book correctly (I may be conflating two stories), the author complains about professional parents whose line of work required empathy were surprisingly unempathetic in dealing with their children, and appeared to comment that it's almost as if their goal was to break their son's spirit, but despite the allegation the author does not take seriously this possible goal. I submit that this guess is right on the money. At one point, their son worked with disabled people and was awarded a trip to a conference which his parents confiscated on the assertion that his room was not clean. The author commented that he would be worried if a son of his age didn't have a somewhat messy room, and appeared to believe that they believe that confiscating such an award was genuinely proportionate discipline for a messy room. I submit that they found a seemingly socially appropriate way to implement socially inappropriate behavior, and they confiscated the trip and honor because it was a seemingly, or at least arguably, socially appropriate way to break his spirit on terms that even the author of People of the Lie would not equate with a naked and obvious effort to break their son's spirit.
What this means for the profoundly gifted, or many who are gifted but happen not to be at that echelon, is this. "Confucius say that elevator smell different to dwarf." Maybe, but Confucius should also say eight foot tall elevator feel different to nine or ten foot tall intellectual giant. In cases where he was treating a child of "people of the lie," the author usually found the child much less sick, and more of a victim, than parents guilty of aggression. (He talked about the "identified patient," meaning that in a dysfunctional situation the person labelled as a psychiatric patient may well be the least in need of psychiatric treatment.) Furthermore, as I explored in The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab, meeting someone who is by far the most brilliant person that someone has ever met brings out some insecurities in people. Most of the parents he discusses succeeded in social situations where success requires some genuine sensitivity. The author wonders and is mystified that they didn't apply their well-developed sensitivity to dealing with their child. I submit that they were perfectly sensitive, but applied their sensitivity in the service of a warped goal.
If you are dealing with a People of the Lie situation, a couple of things. First of all, it may defuse some frustration to move from believing "They are trying to behave in a socially appropriate way but doing a mystifying and painfully bad way of doing it (and reasoning with them doesn't work)," to "They are rationally pursuing inappropriate behavior in a way they are presenting as socially appropriate (and the results of reasoning with them are inline with this." It defuses some of "They are being painfully irrational and defy attempts at being rational." And if what they want is to get your goat, standard psychological advice may apply. Second, it is more effective to work with people on grounds of their actual motivation than a motivation falsely presented. Not a panacea, but it is surely not a panacea to tell people who want to get your goat, in perfectly good faith, "You are hurting me."
I submit that being willing to consider the possibility of encountering the rational behavior of "people of the lie" can be part of a constructive exercise of Theory of Alien Minds.
